


The Art of Breaking

by Aamalysstuff



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: A lot of murder, Alternate Universe - Hannibal (TV) Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Arthur is Will Graham, Cannibalism, Death, Emotional Manipulation, F/F, F/M, Food is People, FrUK as Hannigram, Francis is Hannibal Lecter, Grief/Mourning, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, I am going to hell for this, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Murder, Mythology References, Sex, So Dark You need Infrared for it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-01-11 03:42:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18422106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aamalysstuff/pseuds/Aamalysstuff
Summary: In which Arthur Kirkland is grumpy FBI profiler, Doctor Francis Bonnefoy is a really talented cook and Erzsebet Edelstein is the Head of the Behavioral Analysis Unit.





	1. Amour

**Author's Note:**

  * For [endlesscolddreams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/endlesscolddreams/gifts).



> Well, this is happening. 
> 
> Hetalia is my oldest, dearest fandom. Hannibal is my favorite show. I've been wanting to write a crossover between them since forever, and I knew I wanted to go for the FrUK as Hannigram route since the idea took root. Two of my biggest OTPs, merged into one fic. 
> 
> If you are already familiar with Hannibal - God's speed. This starts off with Mizumono. 
> 
> If you aren't familiar with the story of Hannibal the lovely TV Show that ended too soon - I am just here to warn you again that the tags really do apply, and it's pretty dark. It starts off very dark and continues around the same vein, so please take that into consideration.

“You would deny me my life?” Francis had asked him with a curious voice, tilting his head and looking at Arthur with eyes so dark. Blood was running down his cheek, his lips.

“No, no,” Arthur had denied the accusation, head shaking, teeth clenched, blood spilling through his fingers, pressing against the open wound on his abdomen. “Not your life.”

“My freedom, then, you would take that from me.” Francis had said then, “Confine me to a prison cell.” He could recognize it for what it was, the boiling mixture of disappointment and anger and betrayal, _how dare you, Arthur Kirkland, how dare you presume you could put me in a cage._

Outside the rain kept pouring, Arthur’s guts were quite literally threatening to spill across the floor and Francis Bonnefoy was looming over him, standing straight and tall, with golden hair matted with blood and beautiful and frightening like the God of the Old Testament…

“Do you believe you could change me, the way I changed you?”

…And Arthur thought it was only fitting, to die by the wrath of God at his feet, but Arthur had knack for spitting in the face of divinity, so what came out of his mouth was a laugh, awful and strained, and the pain was horrible, but the words…

“I already did.”

…they were a victory.

And he could see it on Francis’ face, in that moment and every moment since when he closed his eyes, the image was branded with iron on the back of his eyelids, Francis with his mouth pressed into a tight line. Francis looking at him as if the whole of time and the wide, open space of this world had shrunk down and been reduced to this, to this bloody and gruesome betrayal.

He had seen the moment Francis’ heart broke – it had been when he touched Arthur’s cheek with cautious and gentle fingers, and plunged a knife into his abdomen within the space of a heartbeat. Then, that moment, _this moment,_ when Francis looked at him and realized that yes, indeed. Arthur had broken his heart.

 _Good_ , Arthur thought. _Yes, I did._

If he were to die there, Arthur would damn well die taking this victory to his grave and he’d walk straight into Hell with a smile on his lips because he knew for sure that Francis Bonnefoy would live his life knowing this: Arthur Kirkland came into his life, ripped open his chest and took a bite right out of his heart. He would live with the marks there, Arthur teeth marks all over the damn thing and he’d never feel whole again.

But Arthur didn’t die.

“Fate and circumstance have returned us to this moment, when the teacup shatters. I forgive you, Arthur. Will you forgive me?”

And Arthur knew then, that his blood was not enough, never would be enough for Francis. His death wasn’t an option, he couldn’t have his victory and savor it. Francis needed him to be alive, so he could see this and live with the punishment.

“No, no, no, no, no. Don’t. Don’t.” Arthur had never begged another person in his life, but Francis held his hand out towards Matthew that was sitting in a corner looking at them, Matthew that had been dead until a few minutes ago for Arthur, Matthew that Francis had brought back from the dead for him, Matthew that was supposed to be Arthur’s _gift_.

A ready-made family, one that he hadn’t even dared to imagine.

If Matthew was supposed to be Arthur’s gift and Francis had moved heaven and hell to bring them into this moment, Francis would take him away just as easily.

“Matthew, come to me.”

And of course he went, Matthew went to him, and he looked terrified, with eyes wide and scared, but he went to him, and Arthur didn’t think he could feel _more pai_ n but there was nothing, _nothing_ that compared, to _this_

“No, no, don’t.”

But God’s forgiveness did not come without punishment.

“You can make it all go away.” There was nothing in the world that could make this blood go away. “Put your head back.” _Matthew, no, this couldn’t be happening, “_ Close your eyes. _” But Francis wanted to punish Arthur and to cut himself away from Arthur, “_ Wade into the quiet of the stream. _”_

Before he had turned around to leave, Francis had bent down over Arthur and ran his fingers across his cheek, smearing Matthew’s blood over his skin. And then he had turned away and left, and Arthur had tried to crawl over to Matthew.

To put his hand over his neck to stop the hemorrhage, to prevent the sliced skin from gushing blood along with Matthew heartbeats.

It had all started like this, with Arthur and Francis being bent over a dying child in a kitchen that was a crime scene, hands clutching tightly at the wound on the boy’s neck. And it had all gone horribly wrong somewhere – time was reversing before his eyes and Arthur’s world was spilling from between his fingers.

In the months he spent in the hospital following that ordeal, he had spent countless hours looking back at that faithful evening and replaying it over and over in his mind’s eye.

Every time it went the same, it ended in death and carnage, but selfishly enough – not his death, not Francis.

 

* * *

 

 

When Arthur was finally sent home from the hospital, he has a huge scar on his stomach that ran from one side to the other. The skin around the scar pulled and tugged tightly whenever he moved, the scar tissue rubbed against his clothing. He was aware of that damn scar in every waking moment of his life – he’d sooner forget his own name, what side was right and what was left, he’d forget about the seasons turning and the color of the sky before he forgot about this.

Betrayal was branded into his soul with that scar – his own carefully constructed web of lies that was meant to ensnare Francis and bring him to justice in front of FBI, in front of world and in front of God, the Fates or whatever higher power that allowed someone like Francis Bonnefoy to exist. 

Then there was Francis’ betrayal, how he saw through Arthur, through his plans and decided that the best way to deal with it was to cut into him and into himself at the same time, Francis that felt betrayed and hurt and it made him try destroy everything that bound the two of them together.

And then sometimes, Arthur took a bottle of whiskey out of his cupboard and poured himself a generous amount of alcohol. He drank one glass, and another glass, and another glass, and then he could admit it to himself that there was another form of betrayal there, the one that stood in defiance to everything that was righteous and moral and sane – the fact that Arthur felt like he had betrayed himself and his own heart and wishes.

He put his hand against the scar on his stomach, feeling it through the layers of clothes. He sighed and closed his eyes.

“If he wanted to kill you, he would have, Arthur. Remember what the doctors said?” Arthur opened his eyes at the voice. He was sitting on the ratty, beat down couch in his living room, with his feet propped on the coffee table in front of him and his third glass of whiskey in his hand. Besides him on the couch, there was Matthew.

His dear sweet Matthew Williams, with his fluffy hair and his kind eyes and his soft voice, lounging beside Arthur and speaking to him kindly. Arthur smiled at him – even though he didn’t feel much in the mood to smile, he couldn’t look at Matthew without at least trying to offer the that bit of comfort and reassurance.

“Yes, dear. I remember. They said he knew exactly how to cut, that it was surgical.” Matthew nodded.

“He wanted you to live.”

Helpless, impotent anger surged inside Arthur and choked him.

“He left us to die, Matthew.” The other’s name cracked on his lips when he said it, and before he knew what was happening he was struggling to blink back a blurry sheen of tears in his eyes. Matthew was looking at him with very open pity and Arthur wanted so, so badly to just…

“We were supposed to leave together, you know? The three of us. Francis made a place for us.” And that hurt, the thought of it cut deeper than anything else, the regret of it was enough to poison even the strongest man, and Arthur’s bloodstream was already tainted and poisoned. Francis had made sure that there was nothing inside of him that remained untouched.

“Matthew, I…”

“Why did you lie to him, Arthur?” Matthew was too kind and soft spoken to ever scold him, but it was worse like this. It would have been better if shouting had been involved or accusations. Arthur knew how to deal with yelling and shouting, but he had no idea how to deal with the disappointment and sheer absolute grief of this moment and every moment since Francis left both of them to bleed out on his kitchen floor.

“The wrong thing being the right thing to do was too ugly a thought.”

Arthur thought about it all the time, what the thing that Francis offered was. He thought back about all those time, starting from the very first ones, all those times in which Francis sat him down on at his table, poured him wine and fed him – braised veal heart, lamb tongue en papillotte, Osso Bucco and kidney pies and sweet breads -  and how all of it was someone at some point. All the meat that Francis prepared for him, all those times that Francis had put a knife in Arthur’s hand and asked him to sous-chef – chop onions and peel carrots besides him while Francis himself was cooking the meat.

And then Francis sat the table and Arthur took his seat, Francis poured him wine and looked at him from across the table like food was an afterthought. The real feast for Francis was to stare at Arthur and take him in while he was savoring his meal. Arthur knew now why it felt like that – because the meat on his plate was meant to change him from the inside, slowly but surely, Francis had wanted to change the composition of his bloodstream and turn him into something else, something like him.

Some sort of creature that lived in the shadows at played at humanity, that looked at people and saw them as _meat._ A beautiful lonely monster that wanted to make a companion out of Arthur, someone that would share meals at his table.

Fuck.

That was the thing that Francis offered and Arthur had no illusions about what it would have meant to go with him. Francis, Arthur and Matthew, a happy family running away together, a chance to live out the dream of sharing his life with someone that understood him fully and completely on all levels – and it meant to share the food and to accept that he was no better than Francis.

“He gave you a chance to take it all back and you just kept lying, Arthur.”

And Arthur didn’t know what to answer to that, so he just said nothing at all. He raised his glass to his lips and drained it. Picked up the bottle and poured himself another. What else was he supposed to do when the reality of his choices all led him here? Arthur laughed into his glass.

Hell, God had a pretty rotten sense of humor.

“God has nothing to do with this.” Matthew said, in a perfect echo of his thoughts.

“No, God doesn’t have anything to do with it.” He agreed, and the unspoken truth laid between the two of them, that the great Maestro of their fate was not some holy, unseen being. He had a face and body and two hands which were drenched in blood.

But so were Arthur’s.

“He wants us to find him.”

Arthur’s eyes were looking for something in the darkness of the room, for shapes and shadows that were meant to move, but there was nothing moving, nothing perturbing the fragile peace between the questions being asked and the answers that were given.

“After everything that he’s done, you’d still go to him?”

“Yes.”

And that was that.

The walls and the furniture and the darkness surrounding him all breathed a sigh of relief. It was like this – Arthur had a coin in his hand and he had been fiddling with it for months. Finally, he threw that coin in the air and everyone, the sky and the earth and the air in his lungs and every cell in his body had been humming in anticipation to see how they would fall. Heads or tails.

Now he had his answers.

“If everything that can happen, happens, then you can never really do the wrong thing.”

“You’re just doing what you’re supposed to. ”

 

* * *

 

 

Looking back at how wrong things went, Arthur kept trying to figure out at what point things went wrong, how things went so horribly, indescribably wrong.

If Arthur were more of a philosopher, he would say that it was wrong from the beginning. That he and Francis had been born under a bad star, cursed to meet and wreck each other like the inevitable conclusion of fate. But it wasn’t like that.

There had been moments.

When he walked into that room for a briefing on a case and saw Francis Bonnefoy sitting there in his perfectly tailored suit, with his hair held back in a ponytail and looking like he stepped out of a fashion magazine. Arthur had looked at him - the sharp bones of his face hidden under his skin, the stubble, the smile. Cheekbones too pronounced and aquiline nose, he had thought that the man had striking features - not necessarily handsome, but it did make Arthur look at him a bit too long. And then Francis _talked_ and he had smooth voice and a bloody accent, and he got up from his chair and….He wasn’t taller than Arthur, but he _felt_ taller.

There was another moment then, when they were bent over Matthew Williams. Two days after they first met, and they were both bent over a dying boy, with both of their hands covered in blood and struggling to keep pressure on the wound that his father, his real father, inflicted on him.

All the moments afterwards, when Arthur went to Doctor Bonnefoy’s office, sat across from him on his fancy armchairs and gave him free reign in his head, all the times in which he invited Francis to peek at the darkness that lurked around Arthur’s corners and touch the fears that haunted him.

There was this particular moment in which Francis asked him about his mother and his father, and Arthur opened up to him about his family – how he never met his mother because she died when he was very little. How his father left for days on end for work, and he was left home with his older brother. How his hands had shook but his voice was steady when he said,

“I was eight when my older brother died. He was twelve. He had an accident, fell out of the great oak tree in the garden and broke his neck in the process. My father was away.”  Arthur had taken a deep breath and really, he’d never willing told this to another soul in all his life.

“How did you react when you found him?”

“I thought he was playing. Allistor did that sometimes, tried to scare me. I started shaking him and hitting him, telling him to wake up.”

“And when he didn’t wake up? What did you do then, Arthur, when you’re older brother didn’t wake up no matter how much you shook him and called out his name?”

Arthur could never forget the feeling, the sharp, menacing claws that pushed themselves into his heart the moment Francis asked that. He had looked into the other man’s blue eyes, with their dark, hypnotizing depths and answered,

“I stayed with him.”

Bastard. _Bastard_. Horrible, thrice cursed demon of hell, with his marble carved face and golden spun hair, Francis asked with his voice that coaxed and caressed,

“How long did you stay with him until your father came back, Arthur?”

“2 days.”

Or maybe it wasn’t then, maybe it was still salvageable then. Maybe it was later, when he was locked in the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He had been there, slowly rotting away for months, because Arthur Kirkland had been unlucky enough to catch the eye of Francis Bonnefoy. And the other man had liked him so much that he had probably looked at Arthur one  day and said to himself – _This one. This one I like. So I will frame him for several murders, have him locked in a mental asylum, twist and manipulate everyone around him until something breaks, just for the sheer joy of it._

Damn Francis.

Arthur couldn’t think about that time he spent in the BHCI without wanting to claw at Francis’ eyes out with his fingers. And about the things he didn’t know about from that time, he was even more upset. How Francis had convinced Matthew – dear,  sweet, innocent and painfully young Matthew, Matthew that just wanted a family after his own was no more – How Francis had convinced Matthew to play along with the plan, to disappear and play dead for a whole year so that he could come back as Francis’ gift to him.

That plan had been simple enough –

Have Matthew bond with Arthur. Make sure Arthur gets attached, tie them together, the three of them, like a little surrogate family. Cultivate it over extended periods of time.

Take Matthew away, make Arthur and everyone else believe he was dead. Then bring in back from the dead and dangle family and love and roots in front of Arthur’s face, just to snatch it away.

And Arthur hated him, because he knew for a fact it would have worked out perfectly, it was foolproof. But it had one fatal flaw, that plan – it relied on Arthur being a passive player in the game.

Maybe things went irreparably sour after he was acquitted of the murders and released from his confinement. After that - the first thing Arthur did was approach Erzsebet Edelstein with a proposal.

“Erzsebet, you once came to me to help you catch the Chesapeake Ripper. Let me bring him to you. If there’s anyone that can do you, you know I can.”

They called Erzsebet Edelstein the Countess down at Quantico. The work she did from her position as the Head of the BAU was the stuff of legends. This small, impossibly fierce woman with her whiplash mind and her determination that steamrolled over everything with the force of an invading army. Righteous fury burned inside her. She wanted to catch the Ripper so badly she would be willing to do anything in exchange.

So Arthur and Erzsebet set up their plan and set up a lure for Francis, waiting for him to bite.

But in his heart of hearts, Arthur knew that while all those moments were a downwards spiral and all of them changed him in ways he didn’t want to admit, none of them were truly the cause of divine punishment.

It was not a choice to get entangled with Francis, it was inevitability. Things only turned really rotten the moment Francis gave Arthur a choice and Arthur made the wrong one.

It went like this:

Francis and Arthur were sitting in doctor Bonnefoy’s study. Francis was bringing out notebooks, files and drawings and notes. Him and Arthur were feeding them all into the fire, burning everything away.

Arthur opened one of the files on the table, couldn’t help his surprise when he noticed what they were.

“These are your notes on me.” There was a frown on his face, displeasure evident to his own voice. At one point, he would have loved to study them and pour over them, but now it was completely useless. He didn’t need to see what kind of insight Francis had into his psyche, he’d left himself wide open to the man and let him trample across his head, no need to indulge in the masochistic urge to see if he had been deemed worthy. He must have been, if he had the privilege of taking part in this.

“Indeed they are. FBI will pour over my notes if I leave them intact. I would rather spare my patients the scrutiny.” So in they went, paper by paper, page by page. Arthur felt a twinge of pain at seeing them turn to ash in the fireplace. After the last of the papers had been throw into the flames, Francis said, “I’m dismantling who I was and moving it brick by brick.”

Arthur had been enthralled with the way the light of the fire cast shadows on his face. He took a step closer to Francis, and then another one, raised his hand and ran his fingers over the side of his face, feeling the outline of his cheekbones under his skin. Francis closed his eyes and leaned into the touch, turned his face towards Arthur’s palm and breathed in.

Then he frowned, so slightly Arthur might have missed it, had he not been so in tuned to check for the other man’s expressions. Then before got to wonder what that meant, Francis’ own hand shot up and grabbed Arthur’s wrist in a fierce hold. It took him by surprise, he felt his eyes widen, but he said nothing. Then Francis eyes opened and he stared right at Arthur, his eyebrows tense and his face unreadable.

He closed the distance between the two of them, pressed their bodies together. His grip on Arthur’s wrist was almost painful and his other hand grabbed Arthur by the hair and pulled his head back. He buried his face in Arthur’s neck and breathed him in deeply. For a desperate moment, Arthur’s whole body froze and he thought that Francis might open his mouth and sink his teeth into his jugular, rip his neck apart like the monsters in the stories.

But Francis didn’t. He stayed there, with his nose pressed against Arthur’s skin, then he raised his head and Arthur got a bit lost in the blue of his eyes, his dark pupils. They were so close, and the air between them hummed and vibrated, alive with an unspeakable tension. Francis loosened his hold on Arthur’s wrist, on his hair, but didn’t move away.

The unspoken thing between them was a choice. Arthur could break away from the hold easily and Francis would let him go. And Arthur made his choice them, pulled his hand out of Francis’ hold and then both of his hands fisted in loose, blond curls. He tugged painfully at Francis’ hair, crashed his mouth into his and bit at his lips, kissed him with all the ferocious hunger he was feeling.

Francis’ mouth opened pliantly against his, and he plunged his tongue inside and imagined he might taste blood there. If cruelty and viciousness had a flavor, Arthur expected to taste it in Francis’ mouth, but he didn’t.

It made him angry – _why do I not feel it? How can I not feel it here, all those people you killed, did they not change you? Why do you still feel so human?_

Francis let him be as aggressive as he wanted to, let Arthur plunder his mouth and twist his fingers in his hair painfully. There was no question about who was physically in control, and Arthur felt so painfully aroused by the submission. He pulled Francis’ head back so that his neck was a taunt line.

Arthur drank in the site of him with his mouth all red from the biting and the kissing, his exposed neck looked so appetizing that Arthur’s teeth ached with want to bite him and leave glaring, ugly mark there.

And normally he wasn’t like that. He’d never been so aggressive with any other previous partner, but then he’d never met anyone that occupied his thought as much as Francis Bonnefoy, whether it was as himself or as the Chesapeake Ripper. 

There had been a time, before Arthur fully understood who Francis was and what he did – there had been a time when the voice inside Arthur’s head that narrated his thoughts had a French accent. Even now that he was aware of it, Francis voice whispered in his head when the man himself wasn’t around.

But when Arthur gave into the desire and bit Francis neck and sucked at it to leave painful marks – that was all Arthur and his own need to leave a visible sign. Francis was satisfied to work slowly and leave marks on Arthur’s mind and his psyche. Arthur wanted his marks to be visible, so if the two of them ended up in front of Kiku on the autopsy table, he’d be able to match Arthur’s dental marks to the bruises on Francis’ neck.

He ran the flat of his tongue across Francis’ pulse point, where his neck was already developing a dark bruise. The Frenchmen breathed a soft sigh and the breathy little sound that reached Arthur’s ears sent another stab of _want_ through him.

Want like this was maddening and horrifying, he was shaking with it. Want was probably the wrong word for it as well. It was just too little – you _wanted_ mundane things. Want didn’t begin to describe this need to consume and possess and destroy and it made him dizzy, grabbed his lungs and tore at him from the inside.

He spoke about this kind of things all the time – he was a profiler, it was his job to describe motivation and MO in terms such as possess and consume. When he got into the head of a killer and tried to see what made them tick, what made them want to kill, he felt the need and the desperate hunger of possession like a slick of oil on his insides – those feelings where his and him felt them, but they never originated inside of him.

These were his and his alone. This was Arthur Kirkland knowing for a fact that he would love nothing more than to rip apart Francis with his hands and teeth. He closed his eyes and imagined the feelings - righteousness and power coursing through him, knowing that he’d been the one to kill the Chesapeake Ripper. And he’d be the one to kill Francis as well – and then Francis would be solely his. No one else could ever touch him or look at him or breathe the same air as him ever again.

One of his hands grabbed onto Francis’ neck and he started rubbing at the places he had bitten, maybe a bit too forcefully, maybe his hand tightened just a bit too much.

“Arthur. _Arthur_.”

“Yes?”

“What do you want? Tell me. Tell me, _Arthur_.” And it was the way Francis said his name, with the type of reverence that bordered on blasphemous. It made Arthur’s heart want to burst out of his chest and throw itself at the other’s feet, and made him want to…want to…

Rip his tongue out so he’d never say anyone’s name in that voice ever again. Take his blue, blue eyes out of his skull so they’d never look at anyone else the way he looked at Arthur in that very moment. Feast on his flesh so he’d become part of Arthur, and he could never hurt anyone else ever again the way he hurt Arthur.

“I want to ruin you for anyone else.”

And Francis actually moaned at that, as if Arthur’s raspy words were everything he ever wanted to hear.

He fell to his knees in front of Arthur and pressed his face against the fabric of Arthur’s pants. Francis reached up with to open Arthur’s pants and release his straining erection. He swallowed Arthur with one movement and there was a moment in which the world tipped and stuttered on its axis. He couldn’t see straight and he wanted to burn the image of Francis on his knees with Arthur’s dick in his mouth forever.

If there was ever a time in which Arthur believed he could escape this whole thing unscathed, all hope of redemption went out the window right then and there. There were many things he could justify as being righteous and justified, many times in which he told himself he wanted Francis locked for his crimes for higher reasons, but there was nothing that could justify giving himself to the devil with a smile on his face.

He buried his hands in long golden hair again and bucked into Francis’ mouth, pushing roughly and wanting to see the other choke and gag. Francis didn’t protest at all, didn’t offer any resistance, seemingly happy to let Arthur use his mouth to chase his release.

He didn’t want to put Francis in prison to see him pay for his crimes; he wanted to put Francis in a cage in which no one else to stare at him, only Arthur. He wasn’t looking for justice for murdered people that Francis considered beneath him, he was looking for way to light up the darkness and chaos and need for destruction inside himself, those things that had become so overwhelmingly present since Francis had appeared in his life.

If Francis disappeared from his life, maybe then Arthur would have some modicum of peace. He could dig a hole for himself in the woods somewhere and bury him inside, where Arthur’s darkness couldn’t hurt anyone else and this dangerous game he was playing with a killer could finally end.

Francis kept sucking him through the waves of his climax, until Arthur had to push him away because the stimulation was becoming too much. He sat down heavily on the floor in front of the other man, let his head rest on Francis’ shoulder while he regained his breath. Like this, sitting on the floor with Francis’ arms around him and long, elegant fingers running gently through his hair, Arthur wanted to pretend that they were ordinary and boring.

If he closed his eyes and didn’t think about it, he could just about fool himself that whatever had happened between them just now had been born out of passion, not greed and manipulation. Maybe he could even believe it had been a moment out of many that were meant to follow, not a goodbye.

“Run away with me.”

“Huh?” Arthur mumbled inelegantly. it woke him up from his melancholy daze and forced him to straighten up. He was met with the soft curve of Francis’ lips, all bruised and swollen.

“Run away with me. We can leave tonight. We’ll be out of the country before anyone figures it out and we can go wherever you want. Paris or Rome or…we can go to London if you want. There’s no need to stay here, Arthur – I have no need of this place or the pretenses I built here. You have little keeping you attached. Why stay?”

Francis took Arthur’s face in his hand, pressed their foreheads together. This close, Arthur was able to memorize all the different flecks of blue in his eyes, count every freckle.

“Erzsebet would never accept that. She’d look for us all over the world.”

“We’ll leave her a note.”

“She’s made it her life’s work to bring the Ripper to justice. There’s no way she would be satisfied with that.”

“Of course she wouldn’t be. Darling Erzsebet is much too stubborn to accept such a gift for what it is.”

Arthur didn’t answer immediately. It was always a dangerous business, navigating such conversations with Francis. He had to keep a tight leash on his emotions, lest Francis saw something on his face that gave away his intention of betraying him to the very woman they were talking about. Meanwhile, his own murky feelings and genuine resentment he felt for Erzsebet and her singlehanded stubbornness to trap Francis made it easier.

“Erzsebet wants the truth about you.”

“And you want to deny her the gift of mercy that I’m offering?”

He wished desperately that Erzsebet Edelstein would have accepted her role as a wife to a terminally ill husband, give up her self-righteousness and her desire to catch the Ripper. It would have been so much easier to make a decision if there had been anyone else in her place.

He was still deliberating what he should say when Francis burst out laughing. It took Arthur by surprise, because it was a thing so raw and bitter.

“What would you like me to do for you, Arthur Kirkland? Would you have me burn down the world in your name?”

The accusation made Arthur stand on guard, feeling the hairs on his skin bristle with anger and an eminent sense of impending doom. He ignored it.

“I want the truth.” He said sharply.

“The truth about me? You have it. You want the truth about yourself.” Francis leaned back and away from Arthur, putting distance between their bodies. He ran his fingers through his hair, leveled Arthur with an unreadable expression.

“When the fox hears the rabbit cry, it comes running. But not to help. If you hear Erzsi scream, why will you come running? When the moment comes.”

And a cold hand gripped Arthur’s neck and constricted his throat, because he didn’t have an answer to that.

And it was that moment.

The hesitation and his inability to give an answer were the things that sealed Arthur’s fate and turned the story into a blood-soaked tragedy.

* * *

 

 


	2. Aimez-Moi

* * *

 

Arthur was waiting for his scones to finish baking. It was something that helped keep his mind off of things, and if calculated it right, they needed about 5 more minutes in his shitty oven before they became the right shade of deep golden brown he liked them. In the meantime, he poured himself a cup of tea, grabbed his cigarettes and walked out on the porch to smoke to it outside. He put on his coat, stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth and walked outside with his cup of tea.

He set down the cup on the porch railing and grabbed his lighter. He didn’t get the chance to lit it up yet, his eyes focused on the car that was approaching his house.

Shit.

The black SUV pulled up in front of his house and Arthur was already feeling his blood pressure rising. So much for relaxing evening at home, baking. The car opened and out came Erzsebet Edelstein, with her long hair spilling over her shoulders, dressed smartly in her black mourning clothes. As she walked with sure, steady steps closer to Arthur, he couldn’t help but note the hard line of her back, the way her black slim coat hung a looser around her frame, how her cheeks were shaper and her eyes darker.

Arthur was torn between feeling compassion and empathy for a freshly widowed woman and swearing under his breath because Erzsebet in top 5 of the people Arthur didn’t want to see. He plucked the cigarette out of this mouth and set it besides his teacup.

“Erzsebet. I heard about Roderich. My condolences – I’m sorry for missing the funeral.”

Erzsebet snorted and stuck her hands in the pockets of her coat.

“Thank you for your sympathies. Roderich died while you were in the hospital – I don’t hold any grudges against you for not making it to the funeral,” Her voice was trailed off, and she didn’t look at Arthur at all. Her gaze focused someplace beyond the pines that surrounded Arthur’s home and Arthur took that moment to take his cigarette and lit it up. He took a long drag, annoyed and anxious about what it meant that Erzsebet was here, what she wanted from him again.

“I am not upset you didn’t make it to the funeral, Arthur. But…”

“But?”

“I had hoped, after you got out of the hospital, you would come looking for me.” She turned to him sharply, taking him aback with the hard, steely glint in her eyes. Some things, apparently, never change. “Why didn’t you?”

“I thought I might let you grieve.” He said, and that made her roll her eyes at him.

“I found out about Roderich’s cancer five years ago, Arthur, and we all knew it was going to come to this eventually. Truth be told, it was a miracle how long he was able to fight it. I’ve been grieving for five years, Arthur.”

The lines of her body were all stiff and she averted her eyes from his again, eyes vaguely looking down before Arthur turned away from her. He didn’t want to look at Erzsebet and see what shapes her grief took, what colors. He didn’t want to empathize with her, it was much easier to if he didn’t have to take her broken heart into consideration when he was struggling to deal with his own.

There was a moment of silence that stretched out between the two of them. Arthur took another drag of his cigarette to help steel him from the conversation that was about to follow.

“What can I do for you, Erzsi?” He asked, breaking the god-awful stalemate.

“You must know what I’m here, Arthur.” She told him, her voice airy and light, like it was the most natural thing in the world to give a house call.  And she sounded cheery, fuck, and so face that Arthur felt himself grit his teeth against his cigarette.

“No, actually, I have no idea.” If she was going to play this game with him, Arthur was more that willing to dance around the subject. He wasn’t going to budge. If she wanted him to admit to anything, she’d have to pry the words out from between his clenched teeth. It came out more forcefully than he meant, and he heard Erzsebet’s heels click once, twice and a third time as she came in closer.

“Bullshit, Kirkland. Let’s talk.”

“Talk about what?” He asked and turned to her with a smirk. Erzsebet, to her credit, didn’t blink at him, didn’t look angry. She leaned forward, reached with the palm of her hand and pressed tightly against his stomach. The sharp pain from his scar made him hiss and take a step back away from her.

“Talk about how you were injured in the course of _heroic duty_.” The way Erzsebet spit out the words made him boil inside.

“Fuck you, Erzsi, you know the official version.”

“Yes. Yes, of course I know the official version. I’m the one that fed it to the FBI, Kirkland.” She dropped the pretense of being even cool and composed. Her anger was evident, an ugly grimace of rage and snarling lips marring her beautiful features. “I’m here to check with you – why the fuck didn’t you stick to our plan? We were supposed to go to Francis together that evening.”

“Not all our choices are consciously calculated.” Arthur told her, trying to find his composure again. It was bad to let her get to him like this. Arthur’s temper never had been his strongest point and losing his cool in front of the Head of the BAU was not an option.

“Yeah. Sure they aren’t. But our decisions are, Kirkland, so you tell me now – ” She took another step forward and raised her head slightly, looked him square in the eye so he couldn’t turn away without seeming like he was a cowering – “Why did you decide to call Francis before I arrived?”

Erzsebet took a step forward, and it forced Arthur to take a step back.

“I wasn’t decided on anything when I called him.” He fired back. “I just called him.”

“Liar, you knew what you were doing.” She got all up in his space, her poked at his stomach again. It made his back away slightly. It was a trick, a technique Erzsi used to the best of her advantage and Arthur had seen her do it tons of times before.

“No, that’s not true. I deliberated while the phone rang. I _decided_ when I heard his voice.” He threw the cigarette butt over the porch and didn’t care much where it fell.

“You told him we knew.”

And Arthur felt the railing of his porch press against his back, Erzsebet had effectively pushed him into a corner. She didn’t stop from crowding him – she did it often, this particular trick. Erzsebet was shorter and slimmer than any of the men she worked, but she used her body as a tool nonetheless. She back them into corners and crowded them, got into their personal space and if pushed into a corner they would all cave, because none of them would admit the following – if she were another guy, they’d just push her aside. If Erzsebet Edelstein didn’t come with breast and long hair, at least one of the men she worked with would have clocked her in the jaw, consequences be damned.

But Erzsebet knew she could get away with the poking and prodding and pushing and shoving beyond the regularly established rules, because none of them would do anything against her. Doing something, stepping back, stepping aside, it all meant that the men she worked with would have to admit they were intimidated by her, scared of the wrath and righteous fury of a five-foot-three woman that weighed next to nothing.

Arthur looked away from her accusing eyes, broke the hold she had against him.

“I told him to run.”

“Why? Why would you do that? Kirkland, fucking look at me and tell me – why would you do that, when you knew _exactly_ what he was capable off? Did you set us up? Did think about it from the beginning? Was this a ploy of yours or did you just get scarred or did…”

“I told him to run because I wanted him to run!” He yell back at her, wanting to shut her up and stop the tirade of accusations. He took a step around her and escaped her presence. He put several steps worth of distance between them and stood with his back towards.

God, she was annoying and completely relentless. Erzsebet was completely unaffected by his yelling or his retreat, she just continued, not missing a beat, yelling at him louder.

“You told him to run because you were too scared of him, weren’t you?”

 _No, actually he wasn’t. He was never afraid of Francis_.

“You spineless coward, did the people he kill not mean a thing to you?”

 _Of course they meant something to Arthur, all those people Francis killed and then left for him to find like fucking gifts_. All those sleepless nights, all those times he thought he was crazy, but it was just a result of Francis’ manipulations.

“I’m more of a man than you are, you don’t even deserve to stand in front of me.”

 _Probably, but not because of the reasons she was accusing him off.  – Erzsebet should have known that_.

“Have the decency not to lie to me, Kirkland, you wanted him to run because you were afraid to face him!”

That made him turn around to her, hands shaking with anger and teeth clenched. She was yelling at him, but fuck Erzsebet Edelstein, he could damn well yell back.

“I wanted to him run because he was my....” But he closed his mouth around the world, biting his tongue so hard he drew blood.

“Friend?” She spit back. Arthur wanted to open his mouth and agree with her – yes, friend. That was a good word, that worked better than the one Arthur had. But she didn’t let him say anything, just carried on. “Please don’t kid yourself, he was never your friend. Tell me, is that what you were afraid of seeing? That you would have him look at you without the pretenses and see that you meant nothing? Is that why you wanted him to run away? Because you…”

“Because I wanted to run away with him.” He yelled at her, because he couldn’t listen to her anymore.

And that shut her up.

That shut Erzsebet up and the admission seemed to catch her off guard.

Arthur felt a moment of intense, gratifying satisfaction, until he realized what actually came out of his mouth. Realization and horror came over him as he was looking at Erzsebet and saw her straighten shoulders, a smug look of victory settling on her features.

That’s when Arthur realized that he let himself get played right into the Erzsebet’s trap. She had goaded him into getting mad and yelling out exactly the thing he wanted to avoid, the one thing he barely got t admit to himself.

He wanted to run away with Francis. Erzsebet had fucking known it, or at least suspected it, and now he confirmed it to her.

“Thank you for your honesty, Arthur.”

“Conniving bitch you are, Erszi.” But he wasn’t actually angry with her, felt himself boil with interior rage.

Francis push him until he blurted out things he wanted to keep hidden. He wondered idly if Erzsebet had got it from Francis, Francis had gotten from Erzsebet, or he was just so damn easy to read and predictable that his defense mechanisms and temper were to clearly written on his sleeve that anyone could see it.

Erzsebet didn’t say anything at that, she just plastered this smile on her face that was all fake politeness and grace. Then, just as easily, the smile dropped. She walked passed him and, just before taking her first steps down the porch she threw over her shoulder –

“I hope you’re not planning on leaving the country, Arthur.”

With that she walked back to her car. Arthur looked at her followed her black SUV as it was leaving his property, swearing under his breath and wishing he would have thought to get more cigarettes with him.

A sharp, annoying alarm started sounding from inside his house, making him run to check it out. It was the scones, of course it was the scones. He’d been out with Erzsebet for longer than 20 minutes, and how his house was full of smoke. Arthur threw open the oven door and looked grabbed the tray with towel and threw it on the table.

He spent the next minutes airing out his house and muttering under his breath about cunning Hungarians and how he was supposed to know better than to trust anyone from continental Europe. Afterwards, he was left sitting at his table, looking dejectedly at his carbonized scones.

“The poor scones are already dead, Arthur. You’re not going to bring them back by glaring at them.”

Arthur’s gaze turned form the scones to glare at Matthew, that was sitting on the opposite side of the table. He didn’t say anything, so Matthew smiled at him in a way that was familiar and unnatural on his face. It threw him off a bit, how well that smile looked on his face, because he saw Francis in it.

“You’re not going to bring him back by staring at the scones either.”

He wondered if this was how life could have been, had he made different choices. If he could have been somewhere in bloody fucking Paris or in some chateau in the South of France, trying to bake scones for Francis and Matthew.

No, Francis wouldn’t let him near the oven. He’d be delegated to chopping vegetables and pouring wine and tasting sauces that were absolutely heavenly on his tongue.

Arthur wondered what part of his soul was he giving up for simply entertaining these thoughts. What circle of hell was he going to end up in for putting the life of a monster above the lives of his victims. He didn’t know, there were many crimes he was guilty of.

 _Seventh Circle,_ a voice whispered in his mind, _for violence._ It was Francis’ voice, of course it was, and he could imagine the man himself sitting in front of Arthur with his lips curved pleasantly. _Violence against Neighbors, God and Nature._

And then there was the other vision of Francis, with his snarling mouth and blood on his hands and face, heartbroken and betrayed. It was that vision of Francis that grabbed Arthur and pulled him close to breathe against the shell of his ear.

_I will take you with me to the very center of hell, where the Treacherous are._

 

* * *

 

The plan him and Erzsebet was simple – entice premeditated murder. Arrest him before he got the chance to actually kill someone. Erzsebet offered herself as the potential victim. Arthur was meant to do the enticing.

So he appeared at Francis’ door, all dressed up and with his stomach knotting itself in determination. They spent months together, whispering at each other about things that no one else knew and Arthur had felt themselves settling into a rhythm of push and pull. He took a step back from it and looked at it for what it was – a game of seduction between the two of them, whoever lied and manipulated better, won.

If Francis won – he won himself a companion, because for him it meant that Arthur had given in to the potential killer inside himself that Francis had been itching to meet for so long. It meant that Francis won for himself a partner that could stand beside him and not cower and break under the burden of all the death and chaos he sowed left.

If Arthur won – he won back his sanity, ripping it from between Francis’ elegant fingers. He would get to see Erzsebet put handcuffs on him and took him away. Arthur had hoped that this might have been enough to get Francis out of his head for good. That his sanity had been irreparably marred by Francis, that was a given, but maybe if the man disappeared his life, if he had the catharsis of burning him at the stake, maybe he could hope then to repair the things that Francis broke.

Right?

Right.

So he worked very hard to convince Francis of the purity of his intentions. That the things Francis wanted were the things Arthur wanted as well.

He planted the seed about Erzsebet, about how she was too suspicious and too smart, and Francis had to do something about it. He told Francis that they should plan it out, they should let Erzsebet Edelstein meet the Chesapeake Ripper and have the honor of being his last victim.

“And we leave.” He remembered himself saying, lying through his teeth.  Francis wanted what Arthur wanted as well - to belong and to be understood, and that’s what Arthur offered for months. It had been a trick, Arthur told himself he was simply acting those feeling and emotions. Told himself for such a long time that they weren’t _his_ feelings, they were artificially constructed. “We break away from this life and…”

“…build another?”

All the while, he reported everything to Erzsebet. Every action was meticulously recorded and planned on all fronts, nothing was meant to be left to chance. It was grueling and mentally exhausting, so much so that it made Arthur question which thoughts and motivations were really his, which were fabrications he created for the sake of tricking Francis.  


But really, in the end, they messed up.

He messed up.

It should have been so easy to choose where his loyalties laid.

It wasn’t easy.

 

* * *

 

Arthur was still in his pajamas.

It was morning and there was a very insistent knock on his front door. He contemplated not answering at all, but then he heard a very annoying and chipper voice calling out to him.

“Come on, Artie. I know yah there, open up.”

Ah, yes, nothing better than human headache, Amelia F. Jones. Arthur supposed he had to answer her, because if there was anyone on this earth willing to camp out on his porch until he opened up, that was Amelia. Better let her in now, deal with her and get rid of her.

So he opened the door to her and there she was, with a big beautiful smile on her face.

“Heya there, Artie. May I come in?”

“What do you want, Amelia?” He asked her curtly, without opening his door more than a few inches.

“What? Aren’t you happy to see me?” Amelia was completely unperturbed, she pushed against Arthur’s door to be let inside. Arthur caved, he was in no mood to talk to the blonde, but he didn’t want her to get suspicious of him. If she thought he was hiding something inside the house, she might lurk around the edges of his property and a smart, nosy tabloid reporter was the last thing he wanted to deal with.

“Can’t say I’m very happy to see you, Amelia. Last I heard about you, you were enjoying life amongst the living again.” Amelia walked passed him and into his shabby little living room. Her hands were on her hips and she was looking around with interest. Probably already outlining a piece about The Man that Survived Francis Bonnefoy.

“Yes. I have to thank you and Lizzie Edelstein for that.” She turned to Arthur with the biggest, brightest, toothpaste-commercial worthy smile. Arthur felt himself seething inside.

“You’re welcome. Anything else?” He walked over to his coffee table and grabbed his cigarettes and a lighter. Arthur took a seat on the couch and motioned for Amelia to sit wherever she wanted.

“You’re not gonna smoke, right? I hate the smell, wait until I leave, won’t cha?” She took a seat next to him on the couch, though. She always did that, though - sat too close, made too much eye contact, touched people too much. All the tricks in the book to make someone _feel_ like they were safe, like it was okay to open up to someone that had was going to steal information and present next to a gruesome picture and a headline that said “EXCLUSIVE.”

Arthur hated dealing with her. Mostly because he was sure that she was genuinely a good person that really did thought her job as a investigative reporter specialized in murders and serial killers was the more fun version of being a detective. Amelia was nice, but she lacked the patience and the focus for proper detective work.

Arthur leveled her with a stare, took a cigarette out of his pack and stuck it into his mouth. He took a long drag as Amelia pouted and shook her hand in front of her face, trying to prevent the smoke from reaching her.

“Look, Arthur, I’m here to offer you a deal. Why don’t you give me an interview? Exclusive, and I’ll even let you read it before I post it.”

“You’d do that for me?” He said, voice laced with contempt and with a cocked eyebrow that should have made her realize he was mocking her. But, Amelia, true to her character, just nodded excitedly.

“Yes! We can post our stories side by side. I’ll write all about how you and Lizzie approached me, how…”

“I thought you already wrote several pieces about your involvement in The Chesapeake Ripper case.”

“Yeah, well. My readers love it. How daring and brave I was, approaching you when I thought you were a serial killer, how you subverted my expectations by telling me about your plan to catch Francis, how you and Lizzie offered me protection in exchange for my cooperation. Plus, it was really very fun to read about how you guys framed my death just so you can trick Francis into believing you killed me. It’s A+ story telling, Arthur, the people want to know all about it. And they want to know about you!”

“How lovely of them.”

“It’s the perfect story. Also, my resurrection story was so profitable. I have a book deal about it and the money is pouring in. You can have some of it. Come on, Artie. What do you say?”

“I have no interest in your money, Amelia.” Arthur blew the smoke of his cigarette in her direction just out of spite. He was very happy when she started coughing and scrunched her nose.

“Fine, then. Be like that. You know how to reach me if you ever want to help me tell this story.” She took of her backpack and reached inside, looking for something. “I’ll leave you with your nasty ciggies then. Damn you, I don’t want to smell like an ashtray after leaving here.”

She took out a little bottle of perfume from her bag and spritzed it twice around herself. The smell of it was something woody and floral at the same time, and wrapped around Amelia like a fine powder. Arthur couldn’t help himself but inhale the smell of it deeply.

Pretty.

She took notice of this and looked at him coyly –

“Do you like it? It’s the only thing I ever use, you know – it’s not very common and many think it smells like an old lady, but I love this one. My mom wore it all the time – she went to Paris with my dad for a holiday when I was very young and visited the Caron perfume. She fell in love with this particular perfume and came back with a bottle of it. She always carried it with her, and the smell of her clung to all the furniture in our house.”

“So you started wearing in her honor after she died.” Arthur finished for her, voice much more cruel that he ever let himself be. He noted with some measure of satisfaction that the smile faltered on Amelia’s face.

“I suppose.”

Arthur took another drag of his cigarette before stomping the bud of it in an ashtray.

“What’s it called?”

He saw her frowning as she deliberated whether to tell him or not. Then, she squared her shoulders and said, with the most atrociously American accent he ever heard:

“ _Aimez-moi_.”

He burst out laughing at that.

He was still laughing long after Amelia Jones left.

The irony.

That fateful evening in which Arthur Kirkland visited Francis Bonnefoy’s office and knelt with him besides the fireplace. Francis had grabbed him and breathed him and Arthur now knew what he had smelled on his skin.

Right before he set out to meet Francis, he had saw Amelia Jones – believed to be dead, believed to be killed by Arthur Kirkland. She was very much alive, dressed and made up and coiffed and perfumed like her usual self. They had talked about their future – Arthur’s and Amelia’s.

If everything went well and Francis was to be arrested, Amelia would come back out from hiding, return to her readers and maybe to a book deal. She was confident. Arthur was not. Before he left, Amelia had grabbed his wrist and stopped him in his track.

“I hope you survive him, Artie.”

And then he went to Francis.

And what Francis smelled on him was Amelia’s perfume – her outdated, uncommon, expensive French perfume that she had been wearing for years and would never think of giving up. Francis smelled _Aimez-Moi_ on his skin and knew Arthur had betrayed him.

 

* * *

 

Before Arthur had figured out that Francis Bonnefoy was the Chesapeake Ripper, they had been…not really  friends. They had met at work, because of the FBI. Arthur had been asked by Erzsebet to consult on a case, and Francis had been brought in to keep an eye on Arthur.

Then Arthur started seeing Francis in a professional capacity, as his official psychiatrist, but what their relationship become quickly spiraled out of what was considered appropriate between doctor and patient.

Arthur had always known he was a difficult man to deal with. His temper was an awful, wretched thing and his methods of dealing with the stress of his job were far from healthy. Usually they involved copious amounts of alcohol. Most of the time, it was something he indulged in between the four walls of his living room, but every once in a while, he broke from his previously established pattern and went to a bar.

It had been one of those times, when he didn’t really feel like going home, that he went to a bar in Baltimore and got spectacularly drunk. He had been in a pretty rotten mood already and itching to yell his lungs out at someone, when one of the guys at the bar bumped into him and spilled his beer all over the front of Arthur’s suit.

“Oh shit, man. Sorry, dude.” The other man had said, laughing slightly. And Arthur distinctly remembered, something about it just rubbed him the wrong way.

He hated to be called _dude_ , it was such a bloody _American_ thing. Why in the world did he ever leave London? So he could deal with bad American coffee and the piss water they called beer and have the dubious honor of looking at dead bodies that had been skinned alive?

Only to have this _dude_ spill his drink on his and laugh it off?

So Arthur had done the only thing that seemed sensible at that point: picked up his own glass of scotch – it was bad scotch anyways – and poured it down the front of the man’s shirt. That earned him a punch to the jaw and both him and the other guy had been promptly thrown out of the bar.

They got into a drunken shouting match in the street, until the other _dudes_ came out to pick up the guy and drag him away before he punched Arthur again. So he found himself sitting in the street, with the taste of blood in his mouth and anger still coursing through his body, miles away from his house and  thousands of miles away from home, without really knowing what he was supposed to do.

He couldn’t drive back to his house. He could take a taxi, but it would be really expensive. Or he could call someone and have them pick him up.

But Arthur didn’t really have friends in Baltimore, no one he was close enough to ask that of them. Sure, Erszebet might feel enough responsibility towards him to let him sleep on her couch, but that meant he’d have to wake her and her terminally ill cancer patient husband up in the middle of the night, he didn’t really feel up to it.

He had met Roderich Edelstein before they knew about the cancer and he hadn’t been impressed with the man, harbored a low simmering animosity towards someone that was born in a lap of luxury and made a career by playing Chopin and Liszt. How he had ended up with someone like Erzsebet was beyond Arthur – he would have thought someone like her would eat soft, posh boys like Roderich for breakfast. When he had heard about the cancer, he felt bad for him. So the low simmering animosity was still there, it was just laced with pity now.

And right then and there, with a split lip smarting and his head full of vipers, Arthur Kirkland didn’t want to feel pity for anyone else other than himself.

So Arthur called the only other person that he hope might be willing to let him sleep on their couch  – Francis.

“Arthur? _Mon Dieu_ , why are you calling me at such an hour?”   

The godforsaken accent in his voice had actually calmed Arthur down a tad. It was more familiar to him than people calling him _dude._

“Some bloody wanker punched me in the face after spilling his piss water beer on me.”

“Are you in Baltimore? Do you want me to come pick you up?”

Arthur had blinked stupidly at his phone, marveling at how easy it had been.

“I am not exactly sure where I am.” Then, after a second. “I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“Arthur, that is not what I asked.” And Francis had laughed at him, and it did not make Arthur want to punch anything. “It is really no trouble, I am happy you reached out. Tell me – do you want me to pick you up?”

“I can get to your place.” He paused, realizing he had no idea where Francis actually lived. He’d been at Francis’ office a lot of time, not at his house. “Maybe you could just text me your address.”

And it was really that easy. Francis texted him his address, Arthur took a taxi and dozed off in the back seat until the driver dropped him off in front of a two story house that probably cost as much as a penthouse in London.

Francis was waiting for him, dressed in silk pajamas and luxurious looking robe. The other man took one look at Arthur face and tsked disappointedly. He led Arthur into his home, this huge thing that oozed old money and elegance. There were stag antlers dipped in bronze on the walls and artwork showing martyred saints.

Francis led him into his kitchen. It was beautiful, with a wall full of potted herbs that spilled into each other and huge windows. Arthur bet that those windows bathed the whole place in soft, glowing sunshine when it was daylight outside. It was pitch black now.

Francis brought out supplies to clean up Arthur’s split lip. Doctor Bonnefoy refrained from saying anything, so Arthur didn’t feel any need to elaborate on what had happened. The light in the kitchen was artificial, it cast unnatural shadows and caught in gleaming metals. Francis’ pajama blouse was unbuttoned at the top and something caught Arthur’s eyes, shining against his skin.

Arthur had sobered up a great deal during the ride here, but he was still not completely sober. The alcohol running through his system made him bolder than he would normally be, so he choose to blame it on his inebriated state when he raised his hand and pulled at the gold chain around Francis’ neck.

A small, simple gold cross twinkled at him, so innocuous and unexpected that it made Arthur snort out an ugly laugh.

“Do you believe in God, Doctor Bonnefoy?”

Francis regarded him for a long moment, expression unreadable and eyes dark. Arthur knew he had stepped across a limit, but he wasn’t about to apologize for it. Francis looked as if he was contemplating an answer, Arthur wondered whether he was considering telling the truth or turning the question back at him.

_Do you believe in God, Arthur?_

He might consider punching Doctor Bonnefoy in his beautiful face if he did that, he was in no mood for a psych session. Arthur desperately wanted the other man to tell the truth, he wanted something real and tangible to take with him before falling asleep and putting his whole night out of his head.

“My mother believed in God,” Francis said, slow, careful, and right up close to Arthur. He was dabbing cotton dipped in hydrogen peroxide on the wounded lip, but Arthur was focused on his lips, as they were moving and forming words. “She believed ardently, passionately and completely. The will of God was etched into her bones, she used to say.”

“Did God believe in her?”

“He must have.” Francis put down the cotton and applied a cream on Arthur’s wound. It stung. “Mother used to say that I was God’s test of her faith, though I am unsure if she ever found our whether or not she passed.”

“What did your father say?”

“I never knew my father. Mother always kept his identity a secret.” They stood in silence, and Francis picked up the medical supplies and took them out of the room.  When he came back, he brought out two glasses and a bottle of wine, poured both of them a drink – Arthur knew the sensible thing would have been to refuse, he was just starting to sober up, it would be a bad idea to drink more and especially a bad idea to drink in the company of his attractive psychiatrist. But then Francis started talking again –

“My mother believed God spoke to her, sent her messages in her dreams. I remember, when I was a child, there were months when she was plagued with nightmares that made her scream into the night.”

“Were the nightmares sent by God?” Arthur asked snidely. Francis didn’t look at him, but picked up his wine glass and took a sip. He pressed the side of the glass against Arthur’s bruised mouth. It took him by surprise, and it must have shown on his face.

Doctor Bonnefoy smirked, a very ugly and bitter sort of thing that made Arthur’s stomach heat up and his chest tighten.

“She believed so.” Of his hands was cradling the side of Arthur’s face, keeping his head in place while the other held the glass. Arthur wasn’t really sure if he was supposed to lean into the touch or into the cooling sensation against his fresh bruise. When Francis took away the glass and took away his hand, Arthur almost whined at the loss of the attention.

He picked up his untouched wine glass and drained it in one go, frustrated with himself.

“There was this one time when my mother and I were visiting Paris…”

“Visiting?” Arthur interrupted with a frown. “I thought you were from Paris?”

“Do you believe that simply because I am French, I must be from Paris? Awfully short sighted of you, there is more to France than Paris.” Francis scolded him gently. Arthur wanted to protest to that. He opened his mouth to comment, but Francis didn’t give him the chance. “I was born in Marseille, Arthur.”

“Oh.” And Arthur had never considered that someone as posh, elegant and well spoken, someone so utterly, damnably French could be born in any other place except for Paris. He tried picturing Francis as a young boy with golden hair, running through the Port of Marseille and down the beach, with his toes in the sand.

“Hmm, Mother had dreamt of moving to Paris, though, before I was born. So each year, when we had enough money to afford a vacation, she would take me to Paris and try to emulate all those experiences she had to give up.”

And that was another thing that seemed completely alien and unnatural, that someone like Francis wasn’t born into vast amounts of wealth. Arthur was so unnerved by the conversation he poured himself another glass of wine and drank a mouthful of it.

“On one such vacation, we were walking down Point Saint Michel and this group of men passed us. They were dressed in black suits and wearing sunglasses. Spoke Italian, very loudly. My mother stopped dead in her tracks and looked at them. Then she got this strange look, absolutely frightened. She ran after them.

 _Monsieur, Monsieur_ , she yelled after them, and I ran after her too because I wasn’t sure what else I was supposed to do. She grabbed one of them by the cuff of his jacket, and the other ones grabbed her so she couldn’t touch that man. _They’re going to kill you_ , she told the man. His associates were looking at her as if she was crazy – I was so terrified at what was happening. But the man she grabbed, he turned to her with this smile on this face.

 _Who are you and who do you think is going to kill me?_ He asked her. He was all smiles, but there was something on his face, a look in his eyes that made a cold shiver run through me.

Mother told him – _My name is Jeanne Bonnefoy, and I don’t know who will kill you. But I think God has been telling me you’re going to die for a long time_. He started laughing in her face, and told his men to let her go. I asked Mother if she knew who he was, but she had no idea. He let us go.”

Francis drained his own glass of wine and set it on the table.

“What happened after that?”

“Nothing. We continued our vacation. My mother stopped having nightmares for a time and we returned to Marseille. I returned to school and one day, when I came back home, I found this shiny black limousine in front of our house. It was one of the nicest car I had ever seen up close, and I remember wondering what it was doing there. I ran inside and I found my mother sitting in the living room, having coffee with that man, that Italian. The house was full of men, as well, in dark suits, but they none of them were sitting. Just the two them.” Francis’ lowered his head and his blond hair obscured his face, making it hard for Arthur to read his expression.

Arthur wanted to ask what was on his mind, if the men in dark suits were what he thought he were, but wisely kept his mouth shut.

“His name was Romulus. Romulus was a very religious man and very superstitious. He told us that after he left Paris and got to Palermo, someone had tried to shoot him as he was exiting the airport. He believed my mother was some sort of angel sent from God to warn him, so he had looked for her and offered to take us with him.” Francis took a step closer to Arthur and looked him straight in the face.

Their eyes met and Arthur wasn’t exactly sure what he saw there, an expression that was halfway between sadness and disgust, but tinged with bone deep weariness. When he smiled at Arthur, it pulled him in and made his breath hitch in his throat.

“Best practices dictate that one should keep their angels close by, _non_?”

Arthur’s hand shot up on its own accord once more to grab the little gold cross around Francis’ neck and close his fist against it. The other man was so close to him that Arthur thought he might feel some sort of heat radiating off his body, thought Francis might feel the alcohol in Arthur’s breath, feel the air leaving his lungs.

Neither of them moved, too caught up in the heart-clenching intensity of the moment. Arthur ran his tongue over his bruised mouth and saw Francis following the movement. It made him grin, self-satisfied and smug. Francis closed his eyes and leaned his head back, exhaled sharply through his nose. Arthur’s hand tightened around the golden cross in his palm, he wondered briefly if Francis felt the pull.

“The Normal Chapel in Palermo is severe, beautiful and timeless, with a single reminder of mortality – a skull – engraved into the floor.” Arthur was absolutely fascinated by the movement of his throat while he spoke. “I spent many hours there as a young man.”

“Did you find God there?” Arthur asked. Francis look at him from underneath his eyelashes and put his hands on the table behind Arthur, crowding him and pressing their bodies together.

“No,” and when he laughed, Arthur felt it against his mouth. “Though sometimes I think He found me.”

Whatever else Francis wanted to say, Arthur swallowed it with a kiss. Mouth open and lips stinging from his cut, but it didn’t matter what sort of rules he was breaking with this. Arthur had spent time and money and countless gallons of alcohol chasing an elusive, painful feeling over miles, cities, continents. Something inside him had stuttered to a halt and stopped when his brother died, it never really restarted properly after his father found him sitting next to Allistor’s body. Or maybe something had been wrong from the start with Arthur and he just became aware of it then.

Whatever it was, he’d never stopped looking for something meant to fill in the cracks. At this point in his life, he was much too old to believe in fairytales and stories about God, much too old to think there was anything in this world that could possibly fix him.

Kissing Francis made his skin light up and as he pressed his open palm against the side of his neck, he pushed his fingers against the other man’s pulse point. He imagined he could feel the blood rushing beneath his fingertips and pushed harder, pushed with his nails as well until he heard Francis moan against his mouth.

It spread across his insides, desire like a forest fire and somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew this was an inescapable conclusion.

 

It had been the most natural thing in the world to fall in bed with Francis and wake up next to him. There had been nothing awkward about it, it didn’t make him feel bad for using someone else or letting himself be used – it had been fun and passionate and he had wanted to do it again as soon as he opened his eyes.

This had all been before the Chesapeake Ripper reappeared and when Arthur was still blessedly innocent about his identity. When Francis was still Doctor Francis Bonnefoy, and when he was just Arthur’s...something. When he was still Arthur’s _something pleasant._  

 

* * *

 

Arthur remembered himself – all of eight years old and bent over his brother’s dead body, shaking him and crying and earnestly praying to anyone willing to listen to make his brother open his eyes.

His prayers weren’t answered, Allistor was dead and he stayed dead.

And Arthur had stopped praying.

But if Arthur would ever indulge in the act of praying ever again – if he knew it might result in any measure of success – Arthur would be praying for time to unwind itself and fate to rewrite itself, for him and Francis to wake up next to each other in bed and be painfully, terribly ordinary.

It would be lovely to be just like everyone one else, to reach out and find each other in bed and be boringly human. No ghosts, no murders, no meat packed behind the fridge, no river of blood flowing between them, no Gods casting shadows.

But in this ideal world, they would have never found each other, and they probably wouldn’t have fit together so accursedly well. There would be no monsters clawing at the edges of Arthur’s mind, screaming at him to give into the embrace of the one that fed them and nurtured them.

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aimez-Moi by Caron really is a kind of French perfume that smells like old, rich lady. However, the name of it was so fitting that anything else just wouldn't do in this situation :))


	3. What you take with you and what you leave behind

***

Francis Bonnefoy was nothing is he was not a romantic. An old school romantic that believed in elaborate courtship rituals – he wanted to wine and dine Arthur and give him gifts.

The wine part was always excellent and truth be told, so was the dining – up until he realized that the meat had been some rude insurance officer or a pushy salesperson. The gift giving had come later, but it was always something that made Arthur stammer an awkward thank you or try to persuade Francis to take it back. Cashmere scarves that were obscenely expensive and diamond cufflinks, tie pins with bone embellishments and books that Arthur was too poor to even look at.

The gifts from before he found out – he burned them or threw them away. The gifts after – he gave them to Erzsebet so she could – put them in a plastic evidence bag? He had no idea what she did with them – but he didn’t want to see them.

There was one thing, however, one thing he kept. Francis had given it to him days before that wretched night, back when Arthur wasn’t sure where his heart was supposed to lie or even if he was going to make up to the end of the week. It had been a mahogany box with brass inlay, very basic and elegantly made.

Inside of it there was the content of a life. Birth certificate and medical records, death certificate for parents that didn’t exist, marriage certificate, ID and a passport. There was also a complete set of credit cards that Arthur really hoped still worked. Arthur had looked at them, took them home, put them in a plastic bag and buried them in the garden, beneath his rosebush. 

“Erzsebet would say that this would have been the most important thing to hand over to her, Arthur.” Matthew told him as he was struggling with his shovel. He didn’t want to harm his roses, but also buried the damn box deep underneath.  

“Erzsebet isn’t here to judge for herself, is she?” He fired back. He felt his shovel hit something hard and bent down, picking up the box.

When he got it, he wanted to bury it away because it was the real, solid manifestations of his indecision. Arthur doubts had been washed away, though, and he knew what he was supposed to do now.

 He had packed himself a suitcase with bare necessities. Took out money from his bank account – enough to last him a bit, but not enough to raise suspicions. Got himself a bus ticket and paid cash – took the Greyhound from Downtown Baltimore to Philadelphia. There, took the train from 30 th Street Station and went to New York.

It would have been easier and faster to fly from Marshall, but Marshall didn’t have nearly the same flux of people and flights that JFK had. If he was going to fly out of the country, might as well do it from the biggest airport around – the easier it was to disappear, the better.

He left this phone at home, on the kitchen table, thanked the heavens he was well known for not picking up often and not calling back as soon as he saw missed calls. It would take a while until someone decided to check on him – if the past few months served as experience, people tended to shy away from him. They called rarely and visited even less.

Bought a ticket with one of the credit cards Francis had given him, then broke it into pieces and threw in the recycling bin. Kept waiting for the ladies that checked his passport and ID at customs to find something wrong with it, kept looking over his shoulder expecting to see people ready to arrest him. Not for anything he did, rather for what he was planning on doing.

It was an eight hour flight from JFK to Heathrow and when they said “Welcome home, Mr. Chastain” he silently thanked Francis for letting him keep his British Nationality and picking a surname that didn’t sound overtly French. He could deal with being Oliver Chastain, husband of Marcel Chastain. He would not have been able to deal with something that included a double ‘L’, a ‘gn’ or, worse yet, one of those _accent circonflexe._

He got out of the Airport. He spent exactly 22 hours in London. 6 of those hours he spent in the metro and in busses – to and from the airport, going through London. 5 of them he spent in the Airport. 1 hour he spent eating, 2 he spent in looking for this bakery he used to go to when he still lived here. He found it, and spent another hour with his pastries sitting on a bench nearby. He spent about 4 hours wondering through the City that he missed so damn much and realized that he could never really live here again.

Three hours he spent at the cemetery in the neighbourhood he had lived in, the cemetery where his mother, his brother and his father were all buried, next to each other.

He spent three hours in front of their graves and cried, cursed all of them for dying and leaving him alone. His brother he cursed for not waking up, cursed his father for drinking himself to death, cursed his mother for dying before he got the chance to meet her. Damned the whole lot of them for not figuring out that he himself was wired differently – he was wired wrong, he had to be, because there was no explanation for being the way Arthur was.

Maybe there was something wrong with all of them, than the whole Kirkland blood was tainted and that’s why they were all dead and it was only Arthur standing here, Arthur that loved and hated a dark, treacherous, murderous thing that was shaped like a man.

The only comfort he had was that he was the last Kirkland – he’d take the name with him to the grave and never reproduce.

It was the little things that mattered – like the fact that both him and Francis were males and the neither of them could get pregnant.

He snorted at the thought.

Arthur had thought he was used to being alone. He had been alone in Baltimore, had been alone for most of his life. But he’d never felt as truly, utterly and completely alone than he did in that one moment, when he was sitting with his eyes red from tears in front of the graves of his family.

“You still have me.” It was Matthew’s voice, and he didn’t have to look behind himself to see that the boy was there.

“No, I don’t. I don’t think I should keep you with me anymore.”

He closed his eyes and behind his eyelids he could see him, Matthew Williams with his soft smile and kind eyes and a gaping wound across his neck, gushing blood along with his heartbeats.

He saw Matthew disappearing, vanishing in red raindrops of blood and knew that whatever he did from now on, he had to let go of the memory of him. There was no room for comforting fantasies from this point on.

It was only fitting, to let him go here, along with all the other family that other lost to death.

Then he turned back and left the cemetery, went back to Heathrow. Arthur had a ticket to fly to Palermo, and while the flight was taking off, he looked out the window and saw London’s lights and imagined its hustle and bustle. He felt impossible exhausted, a bone deep exhaustion that made him feel centuries old.

But he felt like he shed off years of weight off his shoulders, like the remnants of Arthur Kirkland remained there, to be buried with his family in a little graveyard.

Erzsebet, the FBI, the constraints of morality and justice and what was right and good and proper, all his responsibilities, hundreds of dead bodies that he had looked at, his fears and nightmares and all the dread he ever felt about his future, all of the were behind him and Arthur had never felt so free in his life. 


	4. Die Liebe ist ein wildes Tier

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This Chapter covers more or less the same time span as the first 3 chapters. We just take the time to explore a different perspective on the Chesapeake Ripper affair.

 

 

Investigator for the Office of the Inspector General was quite a mouthful, but it was just like her baby brother to go out and build a career for himself that struck fear in the hearts of reckless law enforcers. As Ludwig had explained it to her before, someone had to keep their eye on the FBI Agents, lest they be tempted to break protocol and step out the clear lines their profession established.

 

Julia knew that’s how Ludwig saw it, but the truth of the matter was – it wasn’t just his title and profession that made people cower in from of him. Even amongst his own peers, there were many that looked at Ludwig with wary resentment. Got promoted too fast, was too smart, too sharp. Ludwig pushed to hard and had a spine made of steel, Ludwig refused to bow down to pressure, Ludwig refused to be swayed by arguments of ‘I was just doing what had to be done’, ‘It was the right thing to do in the long run.’

 

Her baby brother was absolutely, completely unbendable and incorruptible and had made a name for himself as the man you never wanted to see in front of you. Many careers had ended with the scrawl of Ludwig’s pen. Most people wouldn’t be able to do Ludwig’s job, but then again – no one, _no one_ had the kind of ethics Ludwig Beilschmidt had. Julia was crazy proud of him, it made her dark little heart soar with pride and joy whenever she looked at him.

 

“ _Entrapment_. Entrapment, that’s what you’re planning.” Ludwig’s voice boomed across the office, as he threw down the file he was holding on the table.

 

“You can’t entrap someone into committing premeditated murder, Ludwig.”

 

All six feet of enraged baby brother crossed the office in long strides, pacing angrily and probably wanting to find a way to make this whole mess go away. In sheer contrast to Ludwig’s tall, tense form pacing around like an enraged lion, there was Erzsebet Edelstein. Small, slim, with her long hair and her feminine way of dressing, she stood rigid, with her back ramrod straight and her head high.

 

“Yes, you can! You’re doing it. You conspired to violate Doctor Bonnefoy’s property and personal rights. He is being induced to commit murder by an undercover FBI informant. ” Ludwig was getting quite red in the face, but he caught himself and forced himself to breathe until he started yelling his lungs out in Erzi’s pretty, pretty face.

 

The silence between all of them was painful and oppressive. Erzsebet refused to bow her head in front of him, refused to look at Julia that was sitting on the chair next to her, refuse to do anything other than stare directly at Ludwig and force him into agreeing with her with the sheer force of her impressive will.

Unstoppable force meets unmovable object and Julia was actually curious with one of them would break first. Despite the fact that baby brother Ludwig was a wall of muscle, her money was still on the woman sitting besides her. Ludwig was tough, but Ludwig wasn’t Erzsebet.

 

Julia ventured to look at the other woman. Erzsebet’s  mouth was pressed in a tight line, and she could see her body basically vibrating with barely repressed anger. Julia knew exactly what kind sharp, cutting darkness lurked behind Erzsebet’s green, green eyes.

_Crazy stubborn bitch,_ she thought bitterly. Her eyes kept glancing at her, and saw her balled fists and white knuckles, the way her jaw moved while she was gritting her teeth. An unwanted and unneeded surge of affection ran through her, fondness and tenderness getting all mixed up with resentment and anger.

 

“This is outrageous government conduct, Erzsebet. You would never be able to get a conviction out of it, either.” Ludwig sounded tired.

 

“We’re as close as we’re ever going to be to catching this man, Ludwig.” Erzsebet fired back, seeing a chip in Ludwig’s armor that she needed to explore. Unfortunately for her, Julia knew very well that her brother wasn’t going to be persuaded by this.

 

Ludwig walked back to the desk, but he didn’t sit down. Instead, he picked up the file he had thrown away and opened it.

 

“Do you realize why I’m here, Erzsebet?” he asked her, voice much calmer and more composed. The question made Erzsebet bristle and huff. An ugly looking snarl marked her features.

 

“Yes. You’re here because Doctor Julia Beilschmidt filed for allegations of misconduct against myself, because of my methods and investigating tactics regarding Doctor Francis Bonnefoy.” She recited it with as little passion as possible, like she was reading it out of a memo. It made Julia wince, the accusation that she knew was there, behind the cool layer of immobility that Erzsi wanted to put it.

_I will never forgive you, you vile, treacherous woman_ , Erzsebet might as well take hot iron and brand Julia a traitor. She might as well do it, though it was debatable whether or not that was going to bring her any amount of satisfaction. A pound of flesh, yes, that’s what Erzsebet wanted. Julia’s flesh would do, as an appetizer, but she wanted more than that, wanted Francis to be captured and tried as the Chesapeake Ripper then she wanted everyone and anyone that ever wronged her.

 

Ludwig though, he couldn’t care less about what Erzsebet self righteousness demanded.

 

“No, Erzsebet, that’s the official reason. The Inspector General could have sent absolutely anyone in my place and it might have been a better idea. Do you know why I am here, instead of any else?” Erzsebet didn’t answer right away, just looked at him with her gritted teeth and Julia thought is she listened carefully, she could hear her grinding.

 

“Why are _you_ here then, Ludwig?” She asked, haughty and snobbish, with her nose turned up and that made Julia grit her own teeth and tighten her fists in her lap.

 

Julia Beilschmidt had known Erzsebet Herdervary – every gesture and every move of hers, she knew them by heart. Even as she grew older, she was still familiar – stubborn, prideful, pushy, all those things were Erzsebet Hedervary. Haughty, snobbish, turning her nose up, that was Erzsebet Edelstein and she didn’t want to have anything to do with that.

 

“I am here because you don’t have any friends, Erzsebet, not in the Inspector General Office, not in the BAU. Quantico doesn’t like you, Erzsebet and there are too many people that would rejoice to see you out.” Erzsebet opened her mouth like he wanted to protest, but Ludwig didn’t give her the chance. “I am here because I asked to be here, because anyone else – looking at these accusations, anyone else wouldn’t think twice about brining both you and Kirkland on charges.”

 

“Am I supposed to look at this a sort of mercy from you? As a favour?” The word seemed to sting on her tongue, because she spit it out like poison.

 

“Neither.” Ludwig said decisively. “I am here to stop you and Kirkland from hanging  yourself and everyone in you department with you.” He rubbed his temples, looking as if he had a major headache/ “Erzsebet Edelstein, I’m putting you on forced compassionate leave.”

 

“What?”

 

“Forced compassionate leave, Erzsebet, for unspecified amount of time. It will be immediately effective.” Ludwig sighed and looked at Erzsebet’s stricken face.

 

“You can’t do this.”

 

“Go home, Erzsebet, take care of Roderich. You don’t have much time with him, do you? Please, take this period as a time to rest and be with your husband – by the time you will come back- if you choose to come back - all this will be behind you.” That was the kindest Ludwig had ever been, the closest to showing compassion and empathy to someone.

 

Erzsebet threw it back at him.

 

“Ludwig – please. Think about what you’re doing. Me and Arthur, we are still your best bet for catching the Ripper. And we’re so close. Don’t, don’t, don’t shut this operation down now. All of us will regret it.”

 

She was openly pleading with him in a way that Julia had never experienced from her.

 

“You have to let someone else catch the Ripper, Erzsebet.” And with that, Ludwigs took his papers, his briefcase and left, shutting the door with bang behind him. Erzsebet visibly winced at the sound, her whole body shuddering with anger. She looked longingly at the door that just shut, probably wishing she could run after Ludwig and argue with him some more.

 

Instead of doing that, Erzsebet turned to Julia with a hard face.

 

“You have been surprisingly silent all this time. Did you enjoy this? Seeing your brother destroy my career and everything I worked for in one fell swoop?” Julia snorted.

 

“Get over yourself, Erzsi. Ludwig did you a fucking favor, and so did I. You and Arthur are wrong in doing this and you both know it. You would have ended in prison for the kind of shit you wanted to pull, is that what you want your husband to deal with on his death bed?”

 

Erzsebet looked at Julia with these wide eyes that were brimming with angry tears. She seemed to have a good hold on them, until she burst out into ugly barks of laughter and a few of the tears escaped. She wiped furiously at her eyes.

 

“Oh my god, you fucking bitch. This is about Roderich, isn’t it? You still haven’t forgiven me for….” She trailed off, like she couldn’t say the words. Julia felt a knot in her throat, because Erzsebet wasn’t right about that, but she wasn’t wrong either. “You want to get back at me, I get that, but THIS is not the way to do it.”

 

“It’s not about Roderich. It’s about you and Arthur, and how you were about to kill your career for nothing?”

 

“Stop lying to me!” Erzsebet yelled and got up from her chair. Clenched fists and hair streaming down her shoulders, Julia looked up at Erzsebet and saw all those things she didn’t want to face in the other woman. The hurt, the betrayal, the anger.

 

“You can pretend to be blind all you want, Julia, but deep down you know that Francis is the one I’m looking for. And you just gave him a free pass – you used Ludwig to do it as well, he’s going to get away and he is going to kill more people and all of it, all of it – it’s all because you wanted to get back at me. He’s going to hurt more people!” Erzsebet yelled and turned around. She started pacing around the room, running her hands through her hair like she wanted to pull it out.

 

“You don’t know that, you’re just speculating and grabbing at straws. You have no concrete proof Francis killed those people – you’re desperate and it’s showing.” Julia got up from her chair as well. She crossed her hands over her chest and stood there tall and straight, using her height advantage to look down on Erzsebet.

 

It made Erzsebet turn to her with a blaze in her eyes. Julia was taken aback for a moment at the sheer about of passionate self-righteous hurt she saw, how closely it resembled hate.

 

“You did this to hurt me.”

 

“No, I did not. I did what I thought was right.”

 

“No, you liar. Just admit it it – you found a justification to hide behind, but I know you too well for you to fool me, you vengeful, cold-hearted bitch.” Erzsebet closed her eyes and breathed through her nose, Julia followed the motion of her heaving chest. Up down, up down. “You can lie to however you want, don’t lie to me.’

 

“I’m not lying”, Julia answered, with squared shoulders. The denial was something that made Erzsebet bark out a laugh. “I think you’re wrong about Francis…”

 

“Oh, fuck off with this, Julia. What is with you defending that bastard so much? I know you must be smarter than to let someone manipulate you like that. How hard are you working to blind yourself to his actions?” Julia didn’t answer anything to that, which made Erzsebet stare at her strangely. A raised eyebrow let Julia know that she had grabbed on to a new information and she braced herself for…

 

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were sleeping with him.” It was very clear that Erzsebet was just testing the waters with that statement, looking for a new angle to poke at Julia. Nonetheless, whether or not Erzsi believed it, it just rubbed her the wrong way that this conversation was going in that direction.

 

“You have no right to talk say anything about who I am or am not sleeping with.”

 

And the defensiveness in Julia’s voice made Erzsebet smell the blood in the water. It was absolutely irrelevant to her if Julia was or was not sleeping with Francis. Erzsebet didn’t care. Erzsebet wanted to hear one specific thing from her, and she just found a new way of attacking the problem.

 

“You are sleeping with him, aren’t you?” Erzsi said sardonically and her whole demeanor changed. From the angry, screaming woman of before, she turned into this bitter, sarcastic and mocking persona that smiled with too many teeth and raised eyebrows. “You can tell me, you know. I won’t think any less of you, but I must admit I’m surprised.”

 

Erzsebet had this little mocking, flippant laughter that she had exercised. It was not at all natural for her. Neither was the sarcasm, the too toothy smile, the raised eyebrows or the gazing-between-her eyelashes thing she was doing now.

 

“I thought he had the wrong parts for your proclivities.”

 

“Fuck you, Erzsi.”

 

And she had the absolute nerve to smile and Julia saw her own mannerism being thrown back at her, in that way that was uniquely Erzsebet. That mannerism that was unnatural and artificial for Erzsebet, but she had practiced it and based it off Julia. One couldn’t not always be an angry little ball of shouts, Erzsebet had figured, sometimes it paid to like Julia – infuriating and cocky. And swagger wasn’t necessarily  innate, you can learn it and Julia saw it in the tilt of Erzsi’s hips and her smile and how she leaned forward so her hair draped a certain way.

 

But her Erzsi’s eyes were still cold and furious and it threw Julia off balance, got her so angry that she couldn’t see straight. This woman should not have any right over Julia’s actions, shouldn’t be asking for justification, Julia herself shouldn’t be feeling like she needed to justify and explain anything in front of her.

 

“Whoever I am sleeping with, despite their parts, is absolutely none of your business. Whoever I choose to take to my bed – it is not any of your business, Mrs. Edelstein. You have nothing to do with it!”

 

“I don’t. Of course not.” Erzsebet raised her hand to her face and made this show of looking at her nails, like Julia’s anger and her words were merely the tantrum of a spoiled child. Julia wasn’t the one with the tantrum – Erzsebet was. How dare she think she had the right to sit there so dismissively and disregard everything Julia was trying to say to her?

 

“You lost absolutely any right to comment on my life choices. Why the hell do you think you can drag this into a problem that is not there? YOU keep insisting I have a problem with you. I have a problem with your methods, but it wasn’t personal.”

 

The raised eyebrows, the pitch of her voice and her body language – Julia felt her own cheeks heat up from the shouting and her hands were shaking. For all that she tried to remain professional while Ludwig was in the room, it was very hard to do so now. In the end, whether or not Julia’s reasons were pure and righteous did not really matter. Right now, she wasn’t sure about the purity of her intentions either.

 

All she knew was that there was Erzsebet, and Erzsebet made her angry at the best of times. Erzsebet picked at all those things that Julia would rather not deal with and she scratched at them and she pushed them and she made them bleed until it didn’t really matter where the whole thing started – what mattered was that this situation was completely fucked, professionalism was shot out the window, Julia was just about ready to strangle her.

 

All that hurt and tearing and picking and prodding, all those moments in which decisions made Julia ache and bleed, it didn’t matter that it was completely avoidable pain – because those same decisions made Erzsebet ache and bleed too and both of them went for maximum impact.

 

Erzsebet didn’t say anything, but she took a step forward and leaned into Julia’s space, all cocky and infuriating –

 

“You were angry. Admit it. You wanted to hurt me. This is why you did this whole thing – why you reported us to Ludwig. Why you _did not sleep_ with Francis, right? Because you were angry.” And she wasn’t yelling it, she was saying it slow and steady and menacing, like she was narrating a foregone conclusion.

 

“My feelings for you had nothing to do with this.” Julia answered, but she sounded less sure of herself, the forceful was there, but the conviction was wavering because….because…

 

“You were angry at me and you were looking to hurt me….”   
  


“That is not true, I’m fucking better than that - ”

 

“You were fucking angry at me.” Erzsi said, with the forcefulness that had earned her the nickname Countness at Quantico, the sheer stubbornness that could make you believe the sky was red and water burned. It made Julia shut her mouth angrily, biting against the tip of her tongue, she hated, hated, hated Erzsebet when she got like this because there was no getting through to her and, damn her to all the proverbial nine hells, the accursed woman was _right._

 

Julia was fucking angry, and had been angry for so long she forgot what it was like to live without a pyre inside, burning her from within.

 

“Because I broke your heart, didn’t I? Because I kept choosing Roderich all those time, and you spiteful bitch, you couldn’t let that go, could you?” And Erzsebet laughed, and ran her hand through her hair. She turned her back to Julia and you could clearly see her shoulder’s shaking, her spine painfully straight. Julia wanted to hold her with one breath and bash her head against a wall with the other, _Erzsebet you awful woman, stop talking._

 

“You decided to break my heart in turn – but the fun thing is Julia, there’s not much left to break. So you do this – get Ludwig to do your dirty work for you by reporting us, and it’s not my heart your tearing through the mud – it’s my reputation and my career and my life’s work.”  And as Erzsebet was throwing all these accusation in her face, Julia wasn’t really looking at her, wasn’t really seeing Erzsebet Edelstein was she was in this moment.

 

All she was seeing was the ghost of woman that had gone away, Erzsebet Hedervary that willingly married Roderich Edelstein despite not wanting to.

 

“I know you too well, Julia. You’re being unfair”

 

And look, Julia herself was no strange to the meaning of the word ‘unfair.’ She knew it, she lived it, she breathed it. But there were levels of unfair and for Julia and just for her, there was this little thing that stood out, apart from all the shit that the world indiscriminately threw at people. If there was one this that was unfair, it was this – the love of Julia’s life, the woman that had taught her all the meanings of the word ‘love’ – _all the meanings –_

 

The Classical meaning and the Theological and the Philosophical meaning, the one that poets wrote about and the ones that were discussed in the labs and were made up of Serotonin and Dopamine, the lust and the beauty and the anger and the despair of love, all of it, the full fucking spectrum of anguish and desire and sound and fury and silence –

 

All of that shit, Julia had learned from Erzsi, with Erzsi, had learned about it together – either in synch or in counterbalance.

 

And the fucking hilarity of it all was that Erzsi fucked off and married Roderich fucking Edelstein.

 

 And fuck, maybe fucking Edelstein loved her, had loved her, still loved her.

 

He sure as hell didn’t love her as much as Julia did. _Couldn’t_.

 

Julia didn’t think there was anyone else that would willingly subject themselves to this kind of godawful torment that was the relationship between the  two of them and still wait around for the times that Erzsi decided to come back crawling to her.

_How’s yah heart, Schantz? Good? Might be time to put it through the bender again._

 

“Just admit it. Be honest. Tell me. Say it. You did it out of revenge, you saw a change to hurt me and you took it. I know you, at least give me the credit not to lie to my face and be honest, _goddamn you._ ”

 

And Julia couldn’t listen to her anymore, she was too much, hell. There were several inches in height between the two of them, all of them in Julia’s favor, so she used them to step all up in Erzsi’s face and effectively loom over all. It made the other woman shut up, and forced her to look up if she wanted to glower properly.

 

She was close enough to kiss, or to strangle, whichever felt more natural. Both.

Julia’s hand raised itself without meaning to, stopped inches away from Erzsebet’s face. Her fingers balled themselves into a fist before she touched any part that she shouldn’t, Julia felt her mouth tense into a sneer and her stomach clenching painfully.

 

Erzsebet looked at her with a challenge written on her face and Julia had never been the type for refuse her. She bent her head and whispered the words against Erzsebet’s mouth.

 

“You deserved it.”

 

And that shit – that shit right there, it effectively and efficiently cut through both of them for Julia to say that and Erzsi to hear it.

 

But _there_ , fuck it, it was said. She wanted to hurt Erzsi.

 

There.

_I’m a horrible fucking person,_ she thought, and stepped to the side, put distance between the two of them. She didn’t care what Erzsebet did right now, what Julia wanted was to _not_ be in her presence for longer than necessary. So she grabbed her purse of the chair she had sat on and took her coat, ran out the door without looking back.

 

Fuck you, Erzsebet Edelstein.

 

Julia found the nearest door and stepped outside into the courtyard. She took a few seconds to breathe out the anger out of her body. There was a packet of cigarettes she kept in her purse for situations such as this – fished them out, put one in her mouth and lit it up.

 

Julia considered her options taking slow and steady drags out of her cigarette. Outside, the weather was awful.

 

Clouds were fucking heavy and dark with rain, and the winds were blowing something fierce. Julia’s hair was probably already a mess of knots because of this weather, and the humidity. This was a storm of biblical proportions that was brewing.

 

Julia’s pulled her jacket tighter against herself and took her phone out of her pocket. She should have called baby brother Ludwig and ask him where he was hanging, if he wanted to grab some coffee with her and calm her a bit.

 

Instead, Julia called Arthur fucking Kirkland.

 

“Beilschmidt, what do you want? I’m a bit busy here.”

 

“Ludwig canceled your operation.” Julia said, without any sort of foreplay. If there was anyone that could appreciate her direct nature, Arthur fucking Kirkland was the one. Neither of them appreciated to waste their times with pleasentries.

 

There was a pause on the other line. Julia knew she didn’t need to say more than that, there was only one operation, only one way Ludwig would have found out about it – if Julia had told him all the things that Arthur confided in her, all the things she gleamed from Erzsebet.

 

She wondered if Kirkland hated her or silently thanked her for her good timing. She really doubted the man wanted to get out his gun and potentially shoot Francis Bonnefoy or whatever would have come to be.

 

“I see.” Julia didn’t say anything, frowned at the sky. Raindrops started pouring and getting faster and heavier with each second that Arthur spent not saying anything. “Thank you for informing me.”

 

“Don’t fucking mention it. Thought I should let you know before Erzsebet gets a hold of you.” There was another pause, but this time it was Julia that was trying to find her words. She sighed, glared at the rainclouds that were pissing over her and turned back to head inside. Guess one cigarette was enough.

 

“Kirkland?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Erzsi is gonna call you.”

 

“Yes, most likely.”

 

“Don’t let her do anything stupid, Kirkland.” And then she added, for dramatic effect – “Please.”

 

She didn’t wait for Arthur to say anything else. Julia closed the call and went back inside, intent on finding her brother.

 

* * *

 

In the end, of course Erzsi did something stupid, and Julia did something stupid as well.

 

Erzsebet wasn’t about to let a little thing like someone canceling her whole operation get in her way, she wanted to go through with it. Only it was without the FBI’s support backing her up.

 

Julia didn’t trust Erzsi to not to something stupid.

 

Arthur Kirkland was just generally not to be trusted with anyone’s well-being.

 

So one fateful evening – all of them ended up in Francis Bonnefoy’s house, and then they all ended up in the hospital.

 

Erzsebet Edelstein – with a knife wound and head trauma after getting her head bashed against a kitchen counter.

 

Julia Beilschimdt – defenestrated, thrown out the window of the first floor and too many broken bones to count.

 

Arthur Kirkland – quite literally gutted.

 

Matthew Williams – best not to think about Matthew Williams.

 

Best not to dwell on any of it too much.

 

Not on the thousands of times she dined at Francis’ table and he fed her god knows what. Best not to think about all the bodies and the dead people. Don’t think about all the fact that her old friend and mentor was someone that killed people and butchered them and made them into fancy dishes.

 

Don’t think of any of it, she ordered herself as she was sitting in the hospital. Don’t think about the bodies. Don’t think about the meat.

 

Don’t think about how she admired him, how she trusted him. How she would have defended him against  anyone. Don’t think about the betrayal. Don’t think about all the signs she might have seen if she would have been smarter, better. 

Julia Beilschmidt was a fucking psychiatrist, and she liked to think that she was reasonably competent at her job. She helped treat people, she wrote papers, she was respected in her field.

 

And she fucking missed it. She missed the Chesapeake Ripper right under her nose because she was too busy discussing the benefits of beer over wine with him. He helped her pick out clothes. He proofread her papers.

 

They were fucking friends.

 

He gave her advice on how to deal with heartbreak. He gave her advice on how to cook – _oh god, he gave her advice on how to fucking cook, Julia wasn’t going to fucking touch meat ever again, oh my god_.

 

Julia introduced him to Erzsi.

 

* * *

 

What seemed like a lifetime ago, Erzsebet Edelstein approached Julia Beilschimidt with a request.

 

Erzsebet called her one day while she was with a patient. Called insistently and after her patient left, Julia had looked at her phone with its four missed calls, all from the same number, and really really thought about not calling back. However, curiosity got the better of her – Erzsi rarely called more than once, never multiple times in such a short amount of time, so naturally she wanted to know what was going on.

 

Erzsebet had insisted they meet – _maybe you can swing by Quantico? There’s something I need from you, work related._

 

Julia really, really had a feeling it was a bad idea, but she still got in her car and drove all the way there. Erzsebet greeted her with a smile that was a bit more friendly than her usual professional quirk of lips and shoved some bad coffee in her hands, before she got to the point.

 

Erzsi had the decency to wait until Julia smoked a cigarette, before she started talking.

 

“So. You’re friends with Arthur Kirkland.” Julia frowned at the starter.

 

“Friends is putting too much to it. We’ve worked together a couple of times. He teaches at Quantico and you FBI lot roped me into guest-lecturing at here recently. We interacted.” Julia said with a shrug.

 

“You've been observing him while you've been guest-lecturing here at the academy, yes?”

 

“We’re friendly, Erzsi, not _friends._ What is it that you want?”

 

“He likes you.”

 

Erzsebet had kept pushing the issue and it rubbed Julia the wrong way. Sure - sometimes she came over to the FBI academy to hold the occasional guest-lecture – it was part of the course when you were working in the psychology department at a University. But it still made her feel awkward to be here, waiting for Erzsebet to make a point that may. If it had been anyone else…

 

“He likes that I don’t bullshit him. What’s this about, Erzsi?”

 

There was a moment in which Erzsebet looked at her with something like anger crossing her features. It was very brief and well hidden, Julia only spotted it because she was so in-tuned to focusing on the other woman’s moods. It put her on edge.

 

“What are you planning?”

 

“There’s been a series of murders.” Erzsebet started to explain.

 

“Christ, of course there’s been a series of murders. When is there not? What’s that got to do with Arthur?”

 

Erzsebet huffed and literally grabbed Julia’s bad coffee out of her hand to take a swing out of it.

 

“Hey!”

 

“Shut up, you deserve that for interrupting me.” Erzsebet made a face as the bitter aftertaste of coffee remained in her mouth. “Shit, _Julchen_ , how can you ever drink it like that, I don’t know.”

 

Erzsebet took hers with three spoons of sugar and a lot of milk. Professional habit – she worked crazy hours and she drank tons of coffee, most of it of dubious quality. Needed a little something extra to make it go down. Meanwhile Julia took it black.

 

It was the little things that both of them remembered – how the other drank their coffee, how they always had these petty couple-y fights over how _you have absolutely shit taste, why the fuck would you ruin coffee with milk and sugar._

 

“So. I was saying – there’s been a series of murders. I wanted to get Kirkland as a profiler on the case.”

 

Julia had laughed in her face.

 

“Good luck with that, Erzsi.”

 

“Is he that much of a pain to work with?” Erzsebet had asked with a sigh. “I heard a lot of horror stories about him and from what I saw…”

 

“Oh, yeah. It’s pretty damn true. The man is a walking, talking cocktail of personality deficits, with anger management issues sitting very high-up amongst them, but…”

 

“But?”

 

“He’s also pretty damn brilliant.” Julia admitted with some reluctance. “I have no idea how someone like that manages to be so empathic and in-tuned with the human mind. My personal theory is that he is so constantly crabby because he uses it as a shield to protect himself.  He’s unnaturally empathic and just soaks up all those destructive emotions and behaviors from the people around him.”

 

“Hmmm. It seems like you gave it a good deal of thought on why Arthur Kirkland is both brilliant and hell to work with. Professional curiosity?” Erzsi asked with a raised eyebrow and the beginning of a smile

 

“Professional curiosity. Sure. You can call it that.”

 

“Enough professional curiosity to interest you on a special project?”

 

And that’s when it dawned on her what Erzsebet Edelstein, Head of the BAU, wanted of her.

 

“Erzsi – I’m not interested in doing any of your dirty work.”

 

“It’s really not dirty work! Listen – I want to get him as a profiler for this case. But with a reputation of being emotionally unstable, prone to anger and with a distaste of protocol, it’s going to be hard to sell him as a good option.”

 

“So you want to get someone to greenlit him for the work. Keep an eye on him and make sure he’s – what? Stable, well-fed, fit for fieldwork duty? Mentally capable of dealing with the bodies in the morgue?”

 

Erzsebet blinked a couple of times – she was used to Julia’s bluntness in their private lives, but it always took her a bit by surprise when Julia laid everything with simple and crude language in front of her. People tended to dance around the subject when they had to deal with Erzsi.

 

“Well – yes. I wanted your expertise when it came to him. I think he’ll be more willing to talk to you.”

 

“No.”

 

“What do you mean - no?”

 

“I mean no, I’m not doing it. I am not interested in working as a consultant or a nanny, or whatever you need from me. I can refer you to someone else, if you want, but I’m not doing it.”

 

It took some back and forth. Erzsebet pushed. Julia didn’t relent. In the end – a referral had been the best choice.

 

“Look, I’ll send you to the best damn psychiatrist I know – his name is Francis Bonnefoy. Remember Francis? I talked about him before.”

 

“Vaguely, yes. I remember.” _Vaguely my ass_ , Julia wanted to say. Of course Erzsi remembered – while she had never met Francis personally, she had heard Julia talk about him a lot and she had asked so many questions.

 

“Right. Francis Bonnefoy. He was my mentor at John Hopkins and we stayed friends afterwards – so I trust him with my life. You and you’re crabby Brit will be in good hands.”

 

And with that, Julia texted Erzsi a phone number and an address, unwittlingly starting a chain of events that would have better been left untouched.

 

* * *

 

All those nights sitting in the hospital, all those days with nothing to occupy her time other than focusing on her broken bones, her _defenestration_ and her inability to see Francis for what he really was – she kept thinking – what if she had accepted Erzsi’s offer?

 

Ludwig visited her while she was in the hospital every other day. He told her everything about the outside world that she asked about. Ludwig told her when Erzsebet got out of the hospital. Ludwig told her when Roderich died.

 

“I need to go see Erzsi.” Julia wanted jump out of bed and run to Erzsebet’s side. “I can’t leave her alone like that.”

 

“Sister, you’re in no position to get out of the hospital yet. You know what the doctors said.”

 

Yes, Julia knew what the fucking doctors said. She was lucky and she was going to be able to walk again, albeit with a lot of recovery. But she needed to take it easy, bed rest was not optional – it was mandatory.

 

But Roderich was dead and that meant that Erzsebet was now a widow. It meant that she was going to be all alone in that fucking mausoleum of a house, with Roderich’s family and friends and Julia wanted to be there. She wanted to be there so Erzsi would know that there was someone in her corner. She didn’t needed to be surrounded by people that were there only to pity her.

 

And Julia hated, hated, hated the fact that she wasn’t going to be there with her.

 

“Ludiwg – you have to go. You have to go to Erzsi.”

 

“Do you think she’s going to want to see me?”

 

“Ludwig – she’s going to need you there”

 

So Ludwig went to the wake, Ludwig went to the funeral, Ludwig took Erzsebet home and got her spectacularly drunk. He stayed with her while she raged and yelled and screamed and sobbed her grief, and when he visited Julia the next day, there was a bruise on his face.

 

Julia didn’t say anything, but she imagined Erzsi breaking apart and hurting over the death of her husband and Ludwig sitting there like the immovable stone that he was and taking her punches and slaps and grief.

 

Ludwig sat down next to his sister in her hospital bed and Julia cried her eyes out.

 

Fuck death and cancer and murderous cannibals and fuck injuries and this fucking hospital bed, Julia wanted to whole word to stop and acknowledge this monstrous pain.

 

Fuck pride and heartbreak and grieving and anger.

 

It wasn’t fair.

 

It wasn’t fucking fair.

 

Fuck her own damn heart and that part of her brain and her heart that knew she should let Erzsi go – but she couldnt.

 

Fuck Roderich for dying. Fuck him for stealing Erzsi away. Fuck him for leaving her alone.

 

Everything hurt.

 

Her broken legs and her spine. Her heart. Francis and his betrayal. Matthew Williams. Roderich Edelstein.

 

How could Roderich die?

 

How could Roderich die before Julia?

 

Roderich wasn’t the one that was supposed to die. If anything, Julia was supposed to die before him and leave behind a pretty corpse. Erzsi was supposed to mourn tragically over her and then find comfort in her husband.

 

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

 

This was all wrong.

 

Ludwig let her rage away. She wondered if her baby brother understood, if he understood this pain and this resentment Julia was feeling, this goddawful hole that split open in the middle of the earth. This was a goddamn hole that was left by death and Julia wasn’t enough to fill it, she didn’t have the resources to fill it.

 

There was nothing that could make this better.

 

***

Recovery was a long, slow process.

 

After her bones healed, the doctors told her it would take months to be able to walk properly again. It took her 6 months of intense physical  therapy and get most of her mobility back. She wasn’t going to run a marathon anytime soon, but it was good.

 

Ludwig helped her. Stayed over a lot to keep her company. Ludwig visited Erzsi a lot as well. They went for coffee and lunch once a week and they got into the habit of going to the gym together. 

 

“How is she?” Julia didn’t always ask about Erzsi – the woman was on her mind a lot, but that was nothing new.

 

“She’s as good as she can be.” Erzsi didn’t reach out to Julia, so Julia didn’t reach out to her either.

 

She had tried at first – she tried calling and leaving messages and begging. She even went up to the Edelstein mansion a couple of times, only to be turned away by the servants. The message was clear – Erzsi didn’t want to see her. So Julia stopped reaching out, and that was just fine and dandy.

 

Ludwig never gave her any details about the woman’s state of mind and she tried her best not to be jealous. The three of them had a long history together – they grew up in a community of immigrants after all. Julia and Erzsi went to school together. Ludwig had grown up looking up at Erzsi as a big sister – more responsible than Julia was, more diligent with her homework. Erzsebet used to help him with his homework.

 

Ludwig knew how terrible it had been, how horrible the heartbreak had been each time Erzsebet came into Julia’s life and then left it just as abruptly. If Erzsebet had been just some woman – some married woman – that toyed with his sister’s heart, Julia had no doubt that her brother wouldn’t have been so kind to her. But Ludwig knew Erzsi and knew how complicated it all was, knew how neither of them could stay away from the other.

 

Sometimes when Julia and Ludwig were sitting side by side in her kitchen, drinking strong black coffee and not talking, Julia wondered if the rotten, no-good, ridiculously passionate relationship between her and Erzsi was the reason why Ludwig was still alone. He was so handsome and successful, by all accounts her brother was a catch. But he was always alone and never showed any interest in anyone. So Julia had to wonder – was it because of them?

 

Were they such a terrible example in what it meant to be in love that they manage to scare poor Ludwig off of love forever? Julia never said anything about it, but if she ever did, what she would say…

_‘I know how it looks, I know. And it’s painful and it’s awful. But when it’s good – nothing compares to it.’_

 

* * *

 

Julia Beilschmidt was packing shit into a box. Vinyl records, pictures and drawings, mementos.  She picked them up gently from their places inside her carefully organize collection and put them in a box. It hurt her heart a little with each one she took out and put them away, but she couldn’t have them anymore.

 

After she picked up the things she wanted to give away, she hauled the box heavily, taking great care not to put too much strain on her bad leg and took it out to the car. One of her older record players was already there – no use gifting someone a part of a vinyl collection if they didn’t have a good player to listen to them.

 

Julia got into her car and drove out of Baltimore, drove out to Wolf Trap. Off the beaten track, there was a little road that took you behind a wall of trees to Arthur Kirkland’s house. Notorious recluse as he was, the house looked just as welcoming as its owner was. As she was parking her car, she noticed the front door opening.

 

“I don’t like visitors to come over unannounced, Julia.” The man said with a frown. He was dressed wearing a pair of flannel pants and an old ratty sweater. Very endearing, if she was being honest. It fit perfectly with the whole quirky, snotty Englishman look he had going on for him.

 

“Hey Kirkland, help me out here.” She called out to him.

She made him carry the box with the record player and she took the other box. They took it all inside and Julia set up the record player while Arthur brought out a bottle of scotch.

 

“What’s all this, Julia?” Arthur asked as he handed her a glass of alcohol. She took a gulp of it before answering.

 

“It’s just some shit I’m giving away, Kirkland.”

 

“Yes. And a record player. I can see that. What I’m asking is – why did you bring it to me?”

 

“Mostly because I don’t want it at home. I don’t want it anymore, but I couldn’t just throw all this away.” Arthur regarded her with suspicious and walked over to the coffee table, where Julia had abandoned her box with records and drawings. He picked up a random vinyl and held it up. Julia knew what it was before he pulled it out fully and her heart broke a little. Arthur looked at the record, raised an eyebrow and didn’t say anything as he turned the record around to show it to her.

 

A black cover with a naked woman being spread on the table. Men clamoring to seemingly feast on her body. The words _Liebe ist Fur Alles Da_ were looking back at her.

 

“I’m not surprised you have this. I’m surprised you’re giving it away. I always thought it’s blasphemous for Germans to renounce Rammstein.”

 

“I’m not renouncing Rammstein.”

 

“Then why are you giving it to me?”

 

Arthur shot the question with a raised eyebrow. Julia swallowed drily. Both of them knew there was a story there, and it seemed like Arthur wasn’t about to let her get away without sharing it. Julia took a deep breath, drank her scotch in one go for courage and told him honestly –

 

“Francis gave it to me.”

 

Arthur didn’t say anything to that. She saw his jaw working like he was grinding his teeth together and then walked talked to the record player. He started it up, put on the record and while the music started playing, he went back to the box and started looking through it.

 

Julia knew what he was going to find there – a box filled with memories of a friendship that had lasted for years. There were pictures of Julia and Francis together – when they went together to Paris for a conference and she insisted they take touristy pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower, when Francis took her to a Rammstein concert in Berlin, when she was his date for the opera.

 

There were drawings there too, that Francis did of her. Close up work of her hands, her collarbones, her torso with her ribs shaded in great detail and blue veins, more complicated portraits with her long hair spilling over her face. There was a big drawing that was wrapped in a tube, Francis had given that to her for her birthday a year before.

 

Arthur picked that one and opened the tube, unraveled it in front of Julia and looked at it without saying anything. She looked at his face while he studied it, saw the hard light in his eyes and shadows on his face  -  it was Julia being portrayed as Judith, victorious, with a grin like a fucking wolf on her face. She was stark naked and splattered with red blood on her breasts, and she was holding a severed head in her grasp. The head of Holofernes looked a lot like Francis.

 

Julia had taken and she had instantly known what it was – a form of goodbye. By that point, Arthur had come into Francis’ life and the relationship between Julia and Francis had changed. For a long time, she had a certain element of pride in knowing that she was the person closest to Francis.

 

That man had always been an enigma, even to Julia, but she never pushed beyond the limits they had established for each other. The shadow of Erzsebet Edelstein was always looming between them and that was a limit, Francis had never been interested in replacing the mysterious woman that Julia loved so much out of her heart – there was never a chance that would happen, and Francis care about Julia, but not enough to make her fall in love with him and have her earnestly.

 

Julia had been okay with that, she didn’t want anyone to replace Erzsi. She wouldn’t have let them. But when Arthur had appeared…

 

Arthur Kirkland, that was looking at her like he wanted to murder her.

 

“This is very detailed”

 

“It is, isn’t it?” Julia asked with what she knew was very much of a shit eating grin.

 

She wasn’t willing to elaborate more than that. It was none of Arthur’s business, in the end, if Francis knew how she looked naked or not. There was nothing to feel ashamed about – she had known Francis for longer than Arthur did and for such a long time, he had been _hers._

 

Francis had been _her friend,_ her friend that was just hers and not even Erzsebet had gotten to him.

 

* * *

 

Julia Beilschimdt and Arthur Kirkland got incredibly drunk together. They listened to Rammstein records that Julia had gotten from Francis and Julia translated the lyrics.

 

Both of them were in some awkward state of mourning and grieving.

 

“I didn’t want to fucking believe it, Arthur, I didn’t. How the fuck did you and Erzsi fucking expect me to believe that this man – this fucking man that I knew for years – was a murderous cannibal? It was Francis! He couldn’t be! And fuck it, Arthur, you were asking me to believe that I had been so stupid and blind for such a long time?”

 

“In your defense, Jules, I think he tried very hard to keep you blind.”

 

Both of them were deep into their drink and feeling quite maudlin. Till Lindemann was singing ‘ _Der Liebe ist ein wildes Tier’_

 

Time dragged between them.

 

“Were you in love with him?”

 

“No more than everyone else was.” Julia answered honestly. “He called me _Julchen_. I liked that. Made me feel very special. I knew there was something off about him, too many secrets and things I didn’t know about. But he was very charming and no one looks really deeply into someone that charming. I was in love with him in the same way everyone was a little bit in love with him.” She took another swing from her drink and turned to Arthur with a grin that had too many teeth. “I’m not going to do ask the same of you, Kirkland.”

 

“Good.”

They both knew that the answer was different for Arthur. Arthur was different.

 

It sparked a little bit of jealousy in Julia, she wasn’t going to lie. It wasn’t the same all consuming, all enflaming rage monster she felt when it came to Erzsi, but there was still a bit of jealousy nonetheless. Both of them were sitting side by side on Arthur’s beaten down old couch, and Julia looked at the Englishman, studying him closely.

 

It wasn’t that Arthur was ugly. In the soft evening light, with his strong eyebrows and sharp cheekbones, he was even sort of handsome. All the features were alright, but it was something that you had to look for – only if you looked past the hardness and the scowls and the general foul disposition that radiated off of him.

 

She tried to see him like Francis might have, but she came out blank. Everything she knew about her friend had poofed into a cloud of  smoke – Francis wasn’t any sort of regular man, was he?

 

“Do I have something on my face?”

 

Julia ignored him. In one quick movement, she straddled him on the couch and put her hands on his shoulders.

 

“Bloody hell, woman, what are you doing?”

 

But he didn’t push her off  - probably too drunk for the sort of coordination it would take to push her off without pushing her off the couch completely. Arthur’s hands just came to rest awkwardly on her sides.

 

Julia looked at his face close up – there were freckles on the bridge of his nose, fine lines around his  eyes and the skin of his eyelids so thin she could see blue veins underneath.

 

She had met Arthur before, obviously. That was the reason she had refused to work with Erzsebet that one time, why she referred her to Francis. Because she knew Arthur and liked him – Arthur was fun to poke and prod, and she respected his work. They had met at the FBI Academy, when Julia sat at one of his lectures about some run of the mill serial killer and thought the man was brilliant.

 

But Arthur had always seemed a lonely sort of creature, a veritable island of a man that didn’t want or need the company of others. She had taken one look at him and deemed him less of a person and more of a cocktail of personality disorders and neurosis, all wrapped in a package of thorns and teeth, sharp tongue and explosive anger.

 

So she tried to look at him like – like a prey. Like dangerous prey, like she was a hunter and Arthur was the supposed to be the prize in her collection. Like something she could lure out and coax, with charm and soft worlds – submit where you have to, give him as much ground as he wants – play the long game.

 

Was that how Francis looked at him?

 

But it still didn’t explain it.

 

What happened further than that? What changed? Why was Arthur Kirkland still here, still alive? Francis had killed so many people, he’d thrown away a perfectly good life, an excellent cover. He had been satisfied with living in Baltimore – what had made Arthur Kirkland so special that Francis wanted to throw away everything he worked so hard to obtain, only so he could get this one man – and keep him.

 

“What made you so special, Kirkland?” She asked him, inches away from his mouth.

 

Arthur swallowed thickly. They both knew what she was referring to.

 

“I don’t know.” HE answered, and both of them knew it was a lie. Julia snorted, but she didn’t feel like calling him out on it.

 

Instead – she kissed him. Julia pressed her mouth to Arthur’s, heard him gasp in surprise and then reciprocate awkwardly.

 

It wasn’t, by any extent, a very erotic kiss. Had more teeth and tongue than she would have liked, and both of them were drunk and lacked coordination. They bumped noses. Their teeth clashed. It lacked the passion to be truly arousing.

 

But both of them were lonely, and both of them were grieving and they were angry in that fucking impotent way in which you get angry after a great betrayal. The overwhelming sense of loss Julia felt – Arthur felt it too, so at least in this, both of them fit together.

 

* * *

 

Julia woke up to the completely horrible sound of a phone ringing.

 

Her head was throbbing painfully, she was hungover, she was naked in bed with Arthur Kirkland. She didn’t have time to check whose phone was ringing, especially when she noticed that Arthur was still deeply asleep. She stumbled out of bed and picked up the offending phone that was vibrating on the table.

 

“Hello?” There was a long pause on the other line. “Hello?’ Julia insisted while rubbing her eyes and yawning deeply. She could feel mascara and eyeliner smudging around her eyes.

 

“ _Julia_?” She froze. “ _Why are you answering Kirkland’s phone?_ ”

 

Julia felt herself wake up instantly, back straightened and heart pounding.

 

“Erzsi?”

 

“ _Why the fuck are you answering his phone at 7 in the morning?_ ”

 

“Why are you calling him at 7 in the morning?” Julia shot back, without realizing she was doing it. Damn, she almost bit her tongue afterwards. There was no point in antagonizing her and making her hang up. She hadn’t talked to Erzsi in months and missed her hopelessly. Even now, she was feeling a little light headed and weak kneed at talking to her, but she didn’t like getting caught off guard.

 

“ _I wanted to talk to him. Put him on the phone, please._ ”

 

“Can’t.”

 

“ _Can’t. Why? Is he sleeping?_ ” Erzsi asked, all the accusation she ever needed dripping from the word. It actually made Julia want to hide – yeah, the implication was completely and utterly true. Yeah, they did have drunken sex last night, and there were bruises and marks and an ache between her legs that could prove it. But it still made her bristle when Erzsi said it. She didn’t say anything, but she heard the other woman snort over the phone. “ _Right. I’ll call later._ ”

 

“No, wait. Don’t…”

_“Don’t what?”_

 

“Don’t hang up.” She sounded more frantic than she meant to, an edge of begging at the last word. “Don’t hang up, Lizzie.”

 

The old endearment rolled off out of her mouth, _Lizzie_ – like she used to call her when they were kids. Erzsebet had been so very proud of her Hungarian heritage. She made teachers and students and parents repeat _Erzsebet_ until they got it right and corrected them every time. She refused to have anyone say her name wrong, she got angry when they tried to Americanize it, she _hated_ being called Elizabeth. So Julia took to calling her Lizzie, because it made her angry and it made her blush and it made her yell adorably and her eyes get all shiny. She got all up in Julia’s face and yelled at her and started cursing in Hungarian and it was just the cutest.

 

Right now, she heard herself say it and waited with bated breath to see what the other woman would do. There was a silence, heavy, until there was a sigh. Julia felt herself relax slightly.

_“What do you want, Julia?”_

 

“How are you, Lizzie?”

_“I’m going to hang up on you if you ask me nonsense like that.”_

 

And that genuinely made Julia angry. It’s not like she didn’t know she was asking nonsense, platitudes and shit, but she had no idea what else she was supposed to ask. She knew how Erzsi was doing – as best as she could, considering the situation. But what was she supposed to say?

 

“Fuck, Liz. I just want to know how the fuck you are, woman. I miss you. I miss you. _I fucking miss you, Lizzie._ I kept calling you and you didn’t call back. I went to your house. You got your servants to send me away!” Her voice kept raising with every word she said, “ _You sent me away_.” The very real and very painful wound in her chest throbbed. There were tears stinging her eyes.

 

“Liz, I just wanted to see you. Know you’re okay.”

 

Erzsi didn’t answer her, so Julia just kept going.

 

“Ludwig say you’re alright, but I don’t fucking believe him. And I _know_ you, Liz, locked up in that fucking museum of a house, I know you’re miserable there. And I can’t…I can’t stand the thought of you being alone there, Liz.”

 

“ _Julia, don’t…”_

 

“I understand the message of not answering or calling, of sending my away, but goddamnit. _Lizzie_. Just…” Behind her, she heard movement. Arthur had most likely woken up and came to see why Julia was half crying, half yelling into the phone. “You tell me you don’t want to me. You fucking tell me you don’t want me there or tell me you’re okay or to fuck off, just fucking tell me something and I’ll leave you alone.”

 

There was dry sob on the other end and hearing it broke Julia’s heart.

 

“Lizzie. _Liz_. I love you. You don’t have to…-”

 

She didn’t even get to say what she wanted, Erzsi just hung up the phone and Julia ached all over.

 

“Shit. _Shit._ ”

 

She threw Kirkland’s phone on the table and ran a hand through her hair. She wanted to tear it out. She wanted to tear the world apart and bring Erzsi – vengeful, stubborn, goddamn awful and perfect as she was, she wanted to steal her away and never let her go.

 

She took a couple of deep breaths and felt someone put a robe over her shoulders.

 

“I’ll make us some tea.” Arthur told her and slipped into the kitchen, leaving Julia to collect herself for a couple of moments.

 

When Julia had been 11, she didn’t really understand the concept of being gay or straight or bisexual, she had no real idea about what the politics of marriage actually were. Her mother had described marriage as _spending the rest of your life with the person you love most._ So Julia had went out and promptly asked Erzsebet Hedervary to marry her and for months she kept asking.

 

She went to the kitchen and sat down heavily. Arthur lit up a cigarette, gave her a cup of tea and pushed his own pack of smokes towards her. He also gave her some tissues, which she accepted gratefully and wiped the black panda rings from under her eyes.

 

Erzsebet’s mother, the stoic, hard faced Zsofia, had never really forgiven Erzsi for being born a woman. Julia remembered Zsofia Hedervary and Ilse Beilschmidt sitting in their kitchen and chatting while Julia and Erzsi were playing hide and seek with a ruddy faced Ludwig.

 

“ _You are so blessed for having a son_.” Zsofia had said. “ _Boys are worth more in this world. A woman’s worth hardly stretches beyond the confines of her beauty and her sex.”_

 

Zsofia and Mattias Hedervary had tried many times to have another child, but she had miscarried all of them. Erzsebet was all they were going to get. And Zsofia never let her forget that she had been born with the terrible flaw of being a woman, that Erzsi needed to find a husband to take care of her because after a certain age, women were only as valuable as their last name.

 

And Erzsebet – her fierce, stubborn, fearless warrior Erzsebet – Julia had only ever seen her cower in front of her mother. There was no one on this Earth that dimmed Erzsi’s light like her mother did, Zsofia’s mere presence made her shoulders sag and her head bow.

 

And if having a girl had been bad, but girl that had the audacity to fall in love with another girl was completely unacceptable.

 

Zsofia Hedervary was long dead, but Julia was still cursing the old hag with her might. 

 

“I know it’s none of my business….”

 

“Absolutely none of your business.”

 

“…But this entire situation you and Mrs. Edelstein have going on cannot be healthy.”

 

Julia just snorted. She didn’t need anyone telling her that.

 

“I really tried staying away from her, you know. After she married Roderich. I fought with her tooth and nail before the marriage. I tried everything from blackmail to begging to get her to call it off, I asked her to run away with me, I got on my damn knees too many fucking times to count. She still went through with it.” Julia took Arthur’s pack of cigarettes and took one of them out. She didn’t smoke all that much anymore, maybe a pack every week or so, but sometimes she needed cigarettes. “After they got married – I wished her all the happiness in the world and stayed the fuck away from her. And I didn’t see her for about a year.”

 

“So what changed?” Arthur asked, drinking his tea. Julia shrugged.

 

“I kept staying away. Until one evening – I had started my residency by then and worked crazy hours, smoked too much and had coffee running through my veins. I used to get home half dazed. So one evening – I get home and she was sitting in front of my apartment. Apparently my mother gave her my address.” Julia smiled at the memory of it, so far removed from it now. “She had this look on her face – like she was absolutely insulted I had ignored her for such a long time. Started yelling at me that I was so late to get home, that she had to wait for me, that I looked like crap and wasn’t taking care of myself. And I realized I missed her so much and she was so annoying that I kissed her just to shut her up.”

 

It wasn’t anything that Julia was proud of, that their on and off relationship was less of a relationship and more of an extramarital affair, but she also struggled to feel guilty about it. So many of the happiest moments of her life happened in Erzsebet’s company, many of them after she was already married to Roderich. She wouldn’t give those times up for anything.

 

“There’s probably something to be said about my own self esteem and masochistic habits, right?” Julia laughed while grabbing another cigarette and lighting it up after she just put out the previous one.

 

She felt her lungs fill up with smoke and thought about the fact that Roderich never smoked one day in his life and still got lung cancer. Meanwhile, here was Julia – she started smoking in highschool. Decidedly too much time ago.

 

“Why did you go there that night, Julia?”

 

And that as another question that Arthur Kirkland had no business asking. She knew very well what night he was referring to. Julia shrugged and took a long drag of smoke, let it out slowly from between her lips.

 

“If you didn’t really believe Francis was guilty…”

 

“I didn’t really believe it, but Erzsebet did and she was so convinced. I guess I went to I could either convince myself, see it with my own eyes or….”

 

She remembered that one heart stopping moment, when she went inside Francis’s house and saw him, with blood on his face and on his shirt. He looked nothing like the charming man she knew, he looked like a hungry, cold _something_ that wasn’t human, just wrapped up in her friend’s flesh. And he smiled at her.

 

“Erzsebet had given me a gun, you know. When this whole investigation of Francis as the Chesapeake Ripper started, when the two of you cooked up your fucking crazy ass plan. She came to me with a gun and told me she would feel better if I knew how to use it. I thought she was being paranoid, but I took the gun with me that night. I went to Francis and saw him – and the only thing I could think about was that he killed Erzsi.”

 

She remembered Francis, stalking towards her, tall and looming and inhuman.

 

“ _You can stay blind, Julchen.”_ He had told her, while her gun was shaking in her hand. “ _You can hide from this. Walk away, I'll make no plans to call on you. But if you stay, I will kill you._ ” And she knew for certain that was a promise he was going to keep.

_“Be blind, Julchen. Don't be brave.”_

 

But all she could think about was Erzsi and that she didn’t know whether or not she was dead. She squeezed the trigger of the gun, because this man wasn’t her friend anymore, he was the one that might have killed Erzsi. But there was no bullet coming out, and Francis had looked at her with such disappointment in his eyes and told her, “ _I took your bullets._ ”

 

Because she had kept the gun in her purse for a while, and she had never hid it from him, had told him about it, didn’t think she needed to hide. She had trusted her friend. It led to her getting pushed out a window.

 

“I shot at him. My gun was empty, but I shot at him. I thought he killed Erzsi and that was not something I could walk away from. I wanted to kill him for that.”

 

But Erzsebet hadn’t been dead, and Julia now had a cannibalistic serial killer that had promised to end her life. In the grand scheme of things, she still thought she made the right choice.

 

Arthur didn’t say anything for a long second, just looked at her with this green, emotionless stare.

 

“I would have killed you.” He told her with eerie certainty. “If you had shot him – I would have gotten there and killed you for it, if he died because of you.”

 

And Julia looked at him, at the grim determination on his face. And she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was probably the last time she was going to see Arthur Kirkland.

 

“You’re going to go looking for him, aren’t you?” He didn’t say anything, but she saw his fingers tightening around his mug. His eyes widen minutely, a split second of panic, before they narrowed and he regarded her with suspicious. “Look, I understand. No one understands bad habits better than me, Kirkland. So I’m not going to stop you.”

 

“Good.”   


  
“Have you decided? What you want to do after you find him?”

 

“That’s none of your business.”

 

Julia laughed at him, all mean and bitter.

 

“Sure, It’s none of my business. But Arthur? I’m taking shooting lessons. And I make sure I have bullets in my gun now.”

 

Julia got dressed and threw a look around Arthur’s living room. Her pictures, records, Judith beheading Holofernes and _Liebe ist fur Alle Da._ Arthur came to open the door for her. They stared at each other – there was a bite mark on Arthur’s neck that Julia had felt there last night. She wasn’t feeling nearly as bad as she had been this morning, though, and the mischievousness that made her leave that mark came back again, grinning and wolfish.

 

She grabbed Arthur by the back of the head and pulled him in close, gave him a hard, bruising kiss. He struggled against her and she bit his lower lip while she pulled back. Arthur gave her a dirty look while wiping the spit of his mouth, and it made Julia laugh more than anything else.

 

“Give that to Francis for me, will ya?”

 

“You’re not all there, are you, _Julchen_?” He asked as she turned to leave, but there was a glint in his eyes and smirk tugging at his lips.

 

* * *

 

That really was the last time she saw Arthur. A few weeks later, he disappeared. Julia had felt her stomach knotting and twisting when Ludwig had told her, but ultimately, she had been expecting it.

 

Julia had never been able to quit smoking. She had really tried to quit Erzsebet, but that had failed spectacularly.

 

When your skin itched and your blood fizzed and your bones vibrated for someone, it really was only a matter of time until you found your way back to them.

 

And Arthur himself – there was always a darkness inside him, some untapped potential for cruelty.

 

She had to wonder what sort of a damn pair they were – Francis with his smooth talking charm, carefully cutting people up into pieces, taking care not to spill blood on his silk shirts and Arthur with….? What kind of monster would Arthur be if he came out of his shell?

 

Julia imagined some werewolf ferociousness, someone that ripped apart with teeth and nails.

 

It made a shiver run down her spine and she shuddered.

 

When she got home that evening, she poured herself a drink and toasted in the dark.

 

“To Monsters.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I LIIIIIIIIIIIIVE


End file.
